Anticipating a Close Race, the Nation Watched Momentum Shift Toward Trump

A winner was not declared before midnight on Tuesday, but even Donald Trump’s allies seemed shocked by the signs of his strength — and the improbable political comeback it appeared to foretell.

The first signs came in the suburbs.

It was not yet 9 p.m. Voters in key battleground states were still at the polls. There was even a marching band regaling voters at a polling site in Bethlehem, Pa., that was packed with supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But in Loudoun County, Va., the very sort of well-heeled and highly educated suburb that Ms. Harris hoped would lift her to victory over former President Donald J. Trump, the early returns contained a flashing warning for Democrats: She just wasn’t winning by enough.

For weeks, Americans had been told that the presidential race was a tossup, that Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris were tied in all the battleground states — and that it might take days for clarity to emerge and a winner to be declared. But in the hours after the polls closed and the counting began, the momentum began to shift steadily in Mr. Trump’s direction, leaving the country to either reckon with or celebrate the fact that the nation might be about to do this again.

Mr. Trump had lost his bid for re-election four years ago to Joseph R. Biden Jr., having been rejected by voters in the throes of a pandemic. Leaders in his own party turned on him — briefly — after his efforts to overturn that result culminated in an attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

As the results trickled in on Tuesday, though, even Mr. Trump’s allies seemed shocked by the signs of his strength — and the improbable political comeback it appeared to foretell.

Shortly before 10:30 p.m., the Fox News host Bret Baier was ready to proclaim Mr. Trump “probably the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we have ever seen in the history of politics.”

It was much too soon to declare that Mr. Trump’s victory was certain. It was not until 11:20 p.m. that The Associated Press projected he had won his first battleground state, North Carolina. At 12:48 a.m., The New York Times called Georgia for Mr. Trump, too. The so-called Blue Wall states seemed like Ms. Harris’s last chance — but by 1 a.m., Mr. Trump had a lead in every one.

For Republicans, there was more good news. They appeared to clinch the Senate, picking up an open seat in West Virginia and knocking off at least one red-state Democrat, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

As the night went on, a party that had placed a risky bet on Mr. Trump, putting all of its chips on a candidate who had lost the 2020 election, and who has seemed only to grow more politically extreme with time, could see the payoff coming.

Mr. Trump, noted the Fox News host Jesse Watters, “would have a mandate.”

In Florida, Mr. Trump’s election night party at the Palm Beach convention center was already taking on the feeling of one of his campaign rallies, as supporters in sequins and MAGA hats roared in delight over favorable returns and broke into chants of “Fight, fight, fight!”

And at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Ms. Harris’s historically Black alma mater where thousands of her supporters had flocked for her own event, a crowd that started the night cheering and dancing fell eerily silent as North Carolina was called for Mr. Trump.

“You won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” one of her campaign co-chairs, Cedric Richmond, told the thinning crowd at about 12:45 a.m., in a somber address that lasted less than a minute and a half. “But you will hear from her tomorrow.”

It was only a few days ago that Mr. Trump himself had seemed like the somber one. His campaign was rebuked last week by members of his own party for a joke describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” told by a comedian during a rally he held at Madison Square Garden. During his final weekend of campaigning, his voice sounded hoarse and listless, and he spent much of his time on the stump concocting unfounded theories that would explain away a loss, including voter fraud or machines he claimed might change people’s votes.

Mr. Trump’s team urged his supporters to drum up more votes well into the evening, and they seemed to know their audience.

“If you know any men who haven’t voted, get them to the polls,” Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, posted on X at 5:58 p.m.

Six minutes later, he posted once more: “Get every man you know to the polls.”

But, as the night wore on, Democrats were confronting the possibility that a former president they had already beaten — and who went on to be criminally indicted four times and convicted once — could very well be coming back. For months, they had warned he was a threat to democracy who would govern like a “fascist.” They had framed the race, against a man who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, as a fundamental battle for women’s freedoms.

And it did not seem that it had worked.

In Phoenix, Emilio Avila Solis, 24, a Democrat, said a night of watching election returns at a bar had turned into a night of people “pulling their hair out.” In Madison, Wis., Jasmine Shoates, 19, wondered about the fact that a “criminal and an extremist” was on the verge of a second term.

And in Omaha, Alesia Montgomery, 68, and Karen Wright Frazier, 65, were stress-snacking on chips and jerky at a party for the Nebraska Democrats and wondered where it all had gone wrong.

“There are a lot of men who just can’t see a woman in a leadership role,” Ms. Frazier said.

For some Democrats, bigger fears began to creep in. Another Democrat in Omaha began to cry as she wondered what an “unfettered” Mr. Trump would do in a second term.

“Great empires rise and fall,” said the woman, who gave her name — and then asked that it not be used, for fear that she could be targeted for speaking out against the man who could be the next president. “If he wins again, I think America’s best days are behind us.”

As of 2:30 a.m., the tallying was still underway. The race had yet to be called by The Associated Press. But Mr. Trump appeared onstage in Palm Beach to declare victory anyway.

“Look what happened,” Mr. Trump said. “Is this crazy?”

Dionne Searcey, Julie Bosman and Kellen Browning contributed reporting.