For Trump, the 2024 campaign was a grueling two-year marathon. He announced his candidacy at his south Florida Mar-a-Lago club days after the 2022 midterm elections.

And he launched his campaign amid criticism from many in his party that he was partially responsible for the GOP's lackluster performance in the midterm elections.

But after a slow start, the former president eventually easily dispatched a field of GOP primary opponents – which last year briefly expanded to over a dozen contenders – as he ran the table earlier this year in the Republican presidential primaries.

Trump, who was indicted in four different criminal cases, saw his support surge and his fundraising soar in the late spring of this year, after he made history as the first former or current president convicted of felonies.

A month later, President Biden suffered a major setback after a disastrous late June debate performance against Trump reignited longstanding questions over whether the 81-year-old president was physically and mentally up for another four grueling years in the White House – and sparked calls from within his own party for him to step down.

Trump's polling advantage over Biden widened, and the former president was further politically boosted after surviving an assassination attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two days before the start of the Republican National Convention in July.

But the race was instantly turned upside down days later, as Biden ended his re-election bid and endorsed his vice president. Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris, and her fundraising surged as her poll numbers soared.

The Harris honeymoon continued through the late August Democratic National Convention, and into September, when most pundits declared her the winner of the one and only presidential debate between her and Trump. 

But as the calendar moved from September into October, Trump appeared to regain his footing, and public opinion surveys indicated the former president gaining momentum.

Longtime GOP strategist David Kochel noted that we're "still in a country where you have a 70% wrong track. The voters wanted to change who was in the White House."

Kochel, a veteran of numerous Republican presidential campaigns, noted that while Harris "breathed some life into the campaign, some enthusiasm, the fundamentals didn’t change. People are unhappy with the economy. They think the country’s going in the wrong direction. And they wanted to make a change. And it turns out Trump won the change argument."

"And he also ran a very effective swing state campaign with effective advertising that hurt her," Kochel added.

Williams also applauded the Trump campaign, saying that they "had a strategy and stuck with it. They just basically said we’re going with men… they doubled down on men.. they had a consistent strategy for it, and it worked."

And Williams argued that Harris "basically took the Hillary Clinton playbook from 2016, xeroxed it, and made it worse."
 

And both strategists highlighted that Trump was able to overcome his many misstatements and controversial comments.

"We pay so much attention to the crazy things Trump says. All that stuff that people find inappropriate. That stuff doesn’t matter," Kochel argued. "He had a better strategy and an environment that played to his favor."

And Williams spotlighted that Trump "has a way of understanding the electorate and connecting with people in a way that no other politician does. He just speaks off the cuff in his own way, and despite the fact that he tells a lot of mistruths, he’s viewed as being genuine because he’s not a polished politician."