Election Live Updates: Biden to Speak to Nation as Trump Prepares His Return to Power

Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s pugilistic campaign spokesman, said on Wednesday that in Mr. Trump’s call with Vice President Kamala Harris, the president-elect had praised “her strength, professionalism and tenacity throughout the campaign” after accepting her congratulations.

In her concession speech on Wednesday, Ms. Harris tried to reassure anxious supporters, saying: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

Mr. Trump will most likely return to Washington to a Congress ready to submit to his will. The size of his Senate majority has not yet been settled — swing-state Senate races remain uncalled in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona — but it is clear that his sway with Republicans all but ensures the chamber will help him build the government he wants.

Control of the House has not been determined, but the diminishing number of uncalled races suggests the Republicans will hold a slender majority.

Mr. Biden said he has invited Mr. Trump, whom he has criticized with unsparing frankness, to the White House to discuss next steps.

The president-elect told his voters, “promises made, promises kept” in a victory speech delivered in Wednesday’s early hours. But the ambitions of his campaign promises — such as the largest deportation program in U.S. history and extending trillions of dollars in tax cuts — will require more than an election victory to carry out.

Here’s what else to know:

• Trump’s agenda: The set of policies Mr. Trump laid out during his campaign is far more sweeping than what he enacted in his first administration. If he follows through on his campaign trail talk, he would make the government more partisan, further cut taxes while imposing punishing tariffs on foreign goods, expand energy production, pull back from overseas alliances, reverse longstanding health rules, prosecute his adversaries and round up theoretically millions of people living in the country illegally.

• R.F.K. Jr.’s role: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Mr. Trump has suggested would have a “big role” in his second administration, laid out potential public health measures he would oversee if given the chance.

• Trump and Putin: A close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signaled that the Kremlin saw a second Trump presidency as a new opening to form a tighter bond with Mr. Trump, who has avoided condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Delays on Gaza: Any firm progress reaching a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is likely to be delayed until after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, analysts said. The Biden administration has tried for a year in the face of irreconcilable demands from Israel and Hamas.

• Black women and Harris: Black women led an outpouring of Democratic elation when Ms. Harris became the party’s nominee. But Mr. Trump’s victory affirmed the worst of what many of them believed about their country.

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

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Though votes were still being counted in some states, as of Thursday morning Mr. Trump had received more than 72.6 million votes, against around 68 million for Ms. Harris, a gap of around 4.6 million votes.

The last Republican presidential candidate to win more votes than his opponent was former President George W. Bush in 2004, when he won re-election against John F. Kerry. The last Republican before him to do so was George H.W. Bush, the sitting vice president who defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.

The tally is a further measure of the scale of Mr. Trump’s win and another blow to Democrats. The consensus among pollsters before Election Day was that while Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris would run neck and neck in the Electoral College votes that decide the presidency, Ms. Harris would likely gain more votes overall.

The assumption was partly based on recent elections. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore, but prevailed in the Electoral College. In the 2016 election, Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, but some Democrats took comfort in the fact that she had gained nearly three million more votes nationally than he did.

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His regulators filed antitrust charges against Meta and Google and launched investigations into Apple and Amazon. He accused Meta and Twitter of censorship, resulting in Republican-led congressional hearings grilling tech executives. He moved to ban TikTok and blasted Amazon for shirking its tax obligations.

Now with Mr. Trump’s election victory on Tuesday, tech executives face the prospect of another four years of similar uncertainty. The president-elect has promised to put the tech billionaire Elon Musk in a newly created position to bring efficiencies to the government and vowed to deregulate industry. He has indicated that the government’s efforts to break up Google for a monopoly in search may go too far, even though the investigation into the company started in his term. He has flip-flopped on the fate of TikTok, which again faces a U.S. ban. And he has promised more tariffs, which could affect chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers.

The stakes are high. American tech companies — some of the most valuable in the world — are central to how people shop, communicate and consume information online. The industry pours billions of dollars into new and existing technologies, including most recently artificial intelligence. The industry is also in the middle of a geopolitical battle with China and other nations over technological supremacy.

“He’s been incredibly unpredictable on tech and seems prone to changing positions on any topic,” said Scott Babwah Brennen, director of the Center on Technology Policy at New York University.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Brian Hughes, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had the support of “some of the nation’s most respected tech innovators and Silicon Valley leaders.”

“These people understand that President Trump’s agenda includes economic, tax and regulatory policies that will bolster American innovation and restore us to a position of global dominance in the technology sector,” Mr. Hughes said.

To potentially get ahead of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable streak, tech chiefs began making overtures to him weeks ago, with private calls after a July assassination attempt. On Wednesday morning, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the rocket company Blue Origin; Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta; and Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon, all congratulated Mr. Trump.

“Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,” Mr. Bezos wrote on X.

Nu Wexler, a former policy official at Twitter, Meta and Google, said, “The tech companies are wiser and more pragmatic.” While tech executives felt pressure from employees to stand up to Mr. Trump in his first term because of his language and policies against Muslims and immigration, “employee voices don’t matter as much anymore,” added Mr. Wexler, founder of Four Corners Public Affairs in Washington.

After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s early tech policy decisions were largely in line with the Republican establishment. In 2017, his Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules, which barred internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking certain content online.

Mr. Trump’s agenda also reflected a hawkish approach to geopolitical competition with China. In May 2019, he moved to prohibit American telecommunications companies from using foreign equipment as part of a crackdown on Chinese manufacturers like Huawei.

That same year, Mr. Trump’s appointees to the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission opened antitrust investigations into Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. Before he left office, the Justice Department sued Google, accusing it of abusing a monopoly over online search. In August, a judge ruled against Google, and the government has signaled that it may ask for the company to be broken up.

Mr. Trump said in 2020 that he would ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sold the app to an American company. ByteDance’s ownership was a national security problem, he said. It ultimately appeared that the app might be sold to investors including Oracle, the cloud computing firm, and Walmart. Oracle’s chief executive, Safra Catz, and one of its founders, Larry Ellison, have been longtime supporters of Mr. Trump. The deal fizzled, and Mr. Trump left office.

This year, President Biden signed a bill into law that would again force ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban. But — in one of many reversals — Mr. Trump joined the app in June and has since suggested that he would rescue TikTok from a U.S. ban. He has not been clear about how he would do that.

“For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” he said in a September video posted to Truth Social, the online platform he owns.

Mr. Trump made another reversal after the F.T.C. sued Amazon in September last year, accusing it of antitrust violations. Mr. Trump criticized the suit, which had originated from an investigation that began during his tenure.

“Whether you like Amazon or not, how can the Federal Trade Commission sue to break it up?” he wrote on Truth Social.

Mr. Trump has found fans in Silicon Valley, which has typically leaned liberal. His relationship with Mr. Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and owns X and the rocket company SpaceX, was front and center in the final weeks of the campaign. In his victory speech on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Musk a “supergenius.”

Truth Social, in which Mr. Trump owns a 57 percent stake, also introduces a wrinkle to social media regulation.

But some of Mr. Trump’s grievances against the industry have deepened since he left office, former advisers said.

He still has many complaints about censorship and believes that the tech companies’ leaders favor Democrats, said Barry Bennett, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser. While Mr. Trump has become increasingly fascinated by tech — in part because of Mr. Musk — the president-elect still thinks the platforms were biased against him and “won’t forget,” Mr. Bennett said.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for tech because they’ve learned lessons from his first four years,” he said. “That is, if they learned.”

Danielle Kaye contributed reporting from New York.

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But Mr. Trump has also praised Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, saying on a Joe Rogan podcast that he was a “brilliant guy” for controlling 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist.”

Regardless of the direction of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, Beijing has likely concluded after Mr. Trump’s first presidency that he intends to wage a fierce rivalry with China, no matter what he says.

“Xi Jinping is an unsentimental leader with a dark interpretation of America’s intentions toward China,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “He would be open to a friendlier leader-level relationship with Trump, but he would not expect a warmer personal relationship with Trump to dampen America’s competitive impulses toward China.”

Buttressing Beijing’s view is the fact there is bipartisan consensus in the United States about confronting China. Trump may have started an era of bare-knuckled competition with the trade war and increased American support for Taiwan, but that approach didn’t change under President Biden.

If anything, Beijing says U.S. pressure has only intensified. Mr. Xi has accused the Biden administration of unfairly containing and suppressing China. He points to the deepening security arrangements between the United States and its allies and partners in Asia; restrictions on Chinese access to American technology like advanced chips; and the use of U.S. sanctions to punish Beijing for its tacit support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

While the precise details of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy agenda will likely remain unclear until he picks his cabinet, China is already showing it is more prepared for whatever is in store compared to Mr. Trump’s first presidency.

In just the past month, China has been cozying up to American allies and partners who might feel uncertain about the future of Washington’s reliability. It struck a deal with India to ease its border tensions, and Chinese troops exchanged sweets with Indian soldiers during the festival of Divali, along the disputed territory. It hosted senior British and Japanese officials in Beijing to smoothen ties. And it lifted restrictions on key Australian exports to China, like wine and lobster.

Over the years, China has also doubled down on efforts to become more self-reliant on technology, investing billions into developing its own top-of-the-line chips. And China has continued to build up its military. Mr. Xi, in a show of strength earlier this week, inspected his country’s elite Airborne Corps, paratroopers trained to “liberate Taiwan.”

China’s bid to insulate itself from a potential Trump shock, however, could be constrained by its weak economy, which has been battered by a property crisis. China was not nearly as vulnerable during the first Trump administration, and it may have fewer options to retaliate in a trade war.

Some voices in China are urging the country to exercise restraint. Jia Qingguo, a professor of international relations at Peking University, urged China to prepare for greater competition with the United States not only by investing in its military and economy, but also by avoiding accidental military conflict in the South China Sea and Taiwan and sidestepping unnecessary disputes with other countries.

But some Chinese analysts like Zhou Bo, a retired colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing, said that China was getting better at standing up to the United States because it has weathered the opposing styles of the first Trump presidency and the Biden administration.

China responded to Mr. Trump’s blustery Twitter diplomacy by introducing its own brand of muscular and acerbic statecraft known as “Wolf Warrior,” a nickname inspired by ultranationalistic Chinese action movies of the same name. And to counter President Biden’s democratic alliance building, China aggressively courted deeper ties with developing nations and with Russia. As the United States has built ties with Taiwan, China has ramped up exercises near it, including large-scale drills to encircle the island in a simulated blockade.

“Some people in China say Trump bashed China with a hammer and Biden cut China with a surgical knife,” Mr. Zhou said. “We have experienced both of them. But the trend is, China is gaining in strength, despite the stress.”

Ties had sunk to their lowest point in decades in early 2023 after the United States shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon as it floated over the United States. But the relationship had stabilized in the past year as the Biden administration has emphasized intensive diplomacy — dispatching the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to meet with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, several times.

Whether such engagement will continue under the new Trump administration will depend in part on whom Mr. Trump selects as his advisers. Those could include China hawks, such as Robert E. Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative. Depending on who is picked, his cabinet members might also restrain Mr. Trump’s transactional tendencies and instead advocate for a more ideological approach to China based on an opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule.

Parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda may turn out to be favorable to China. During his first term, Mr. Trump showed little interest in human rights, favoring trade and business deals first. In 2020, he told Axios that he shelved a plan to punish Chinese officials and entities linked to the internment of Uyghurs to avoid jeopardizing trade talks.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist-leaning “America First” policy could also lead to Washington weakening its alliances around the world. That could give China an opportunity to fill the void and expand its global influence.

It remains to be seen how China will negotiate with Mr. Trump the second time around. With President Biden, China sought leverage by agreeing to work together on fentanyl and allowing members of its military to hold talks with American counterparts. It is unclear if Mr. Trump would value any of those concessions.

On Wednesday, as Mr. Xi conveyed his congratulations to Mr. Trump on his electoral victory, he emphasized Beijing’s argument that confrontation would hurt both countries. Mr. Xi has sought to push back on efforts by the United States to define the relationship primarily by competition, seeing it as cover for a campaign to block China’s rise.

He said he hoped the leaders could “find a correct way for China and the United States to get along in the new era.”

Some Chinese scholars urged Beijing to move quickly to set up a meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump once he assumes office, noting that direct communication would be needed to manage differences.

Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, noted that during Mr. Trump’s first term, Chinese officials underestimated the American leader, possibly because they were unfamiliar with his approach, but that they should be more prepared for his second term.

“This means being ready for negotiations as well as confrontations; both will be necessary, and we may need to engage in talks and conflicts simultaneously,” Mr. Wu said.

Li You contributed research from Beijing and Hari Kumar from New Delhi.

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Mr. Fabrizio had predicted to colleagues that brutal media coverage of Mr. Trump’s performance in a debate watched by 67 million people would lift Ms. Harris in the polls. He was right about the media coverage but wrong about the rest. His first post-debate poll shocked him: Ms. Harris had gained on some narrow attributes, like likability. But Mr. Trump had lost no ground in the contest.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Fabrizio said on a call with senior campaign leaders, according to two participants.

It was yet more proof — as if more were needed — of Mr. Trump’s durability over nearly a decade in politics and of his ability to defy the normal laws of gravity.

He overcame seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities — four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on 34 felony counts, endless reckless tangents in his speeches — and transformed at least some of them into distinct advantages.

How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny.

“God spared my life for a reason,” he said at his victory speech early Wednesday, adding, “We are going to fulfill that mission together.”

At times, Mr. Trump could be so crude and self-indulgent on the stump that aides wondered if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.

But Mr. Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.

“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.

But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.

The Trump team schemed ways to save its cash for a final ad blitz, abandoning a traditional ground game to turn out its voters and relying instead on a relatively small paid staff buttressed by volunteers and outsiders, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Mr. Trump relentlessly pushed to define Ms. Harris not just as radically liberal but as foolishly out of the mainstream. The inspiration, his advisers said, was a memorable Nixon-era saying by the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein: “A crook” — or, in Mr. Trump’s case, a convict — “always beats a fool.”

Mr. Trump’s aides gambled on mobilizing men, though men vote less than women, and it paid off. And they gambled on trying to cut into Democrats’ typically big margins among Black and Latino voters, and that paid off, too.

His close-knit campaign team navigated the hacking of a top official’s emails by Iranians, constricting security measures by American authorities following two assassination attempts and a final phase that included the use of multiple planes, in addition to the one with Mr. Trump’s name on it, to keep the former president safe.

How Mr. Trump won is also the story of how Ms. Harris lost.

She was hobbled by President Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She had only three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country and she vacillated until the end with how — and how much — to talk about Mr. Trump.

First, she and her running mate, Tim Walz, tried minimizing him by mocking him as “weird” and “unserious,” setting aside Mr. Biden’s grave warnings that Mr. Trump was an existential threat to American democracy. Then she focused on a populist message: Mr. Trump cared only about his rich friends, while she would bring down the prices of groceries and housing for ordinary people. Finally, late in the campaign, Ms. Harris pivoted again: Mr. Trump was a “fascist,” she warned — just the existential threat Mr. Biden had invoked.

Some finger-pointing emerged from the wreckage, including over whether Ms. Harris had focused too much on appealing to wayward Republicans or whether Mr. Biden had dealt her an unwinnable hand. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, wrote on X.

In the end, Ms. Harris got only the one debate with Mr. Trump to make her case. He never accepted a rematch and Ms. Harris’s team was left to wonder if they had missed a chance to box him in. During her debate preparations, they had discussed challenging him live onstage to a second debate — almost daring him to look afraid — but Ms. Harris decided against the move.

That meant no more national moments and eight weeks left to fill — a challenge for a candidate who had spent the first half of the race avoiding unscripted settings. Mr. Trump scored one break from the justice system when a judge pushed his September sentencing until after the election; Mr. Trump privately told people he thought that would have tested what voters would tolerate.

Not every decision Mr. Trump made was genius because he won, and not every decision Ms. Harris made was poor because she lost. But in a race and in a nation so narrowly divided, Mr. Trump and his team made just enough of the right ones.

The strength of his convictions

For almost any other politician, Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts related to hush-money payments to a porn star would have been the worst day of his candidacy. Instead, it gave him financial rocket fuel.

Small donors poured $50 million into his coffers in 24 hours. And his main super PAC was informed by its bank of a $50 million wire transfer the day after the conviction — but needed to first confirm who had sent it first to make sure it wasn’t fraudulent. The problem was they didn’t know because one of the biggest contributions in American history had been sent without any heads up. Eventually, they determined the amount and its source: the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.

The $100 million day helped narrow the financial chasm Mr. Trump had been facing.

To finance a late fusillade of television ads, his team had stretched legal limits to shunt tens of millions of dollars in expenses from the campaign onto the Republican Party and other groups. More significantly, once he became the presumptive nominee, they scrapped the traditional campaign-run, party-funded field operation and outsourced it instead to unproven super PACs.

A scrub of the party’s books from 2020 by James Blair, the campaign’s political director, and Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s co-campaign managers, found that the field operation had cost more than $130 million. That amounted to at least $100 for each conversation with a voter.

“We said we just simply can’t do that,” Mr. Blair recalled. “We just simply can’t spend that much money.”

A surprise ruling from the Federal Election Commission, however, had allowed candidates for the first time to coordinate with billionaire-funded super PACs, and the Trump campaign quickly did so, though Mr. Blair was widely second-guessed by veteran operatives in both parties. No one knew how well those outside groups and their mercenary operatives would fare at persuading and motivating people to vote.

The Harris campaign had spent months hiring 2,500 workers and opening 358 offices across the battleground states — enormous fixed costs the Trump campaign did not have to bear. Last weekend, some 90,000 Democratic volunteers knocked on more than three million doors, the pace reaching 1,000 doors a minute in Pennsylvania at one point.

Polls showed the race was one of the closest in modern history, and Ms. Harris’s team believed their superior infrastructure and army of believers would make the difference. But Mr. Fabrizio’s internal polling told a different and, it turned out, more accurate story — one in which Mr. Trump kept a consistent lead.

A ground game only matters in an exceedingly close race. In the end, Ms. Harris did not come close enough.

The gender gap

Mr. Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion.

He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the G.O.P.’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to single-handedly sink his campaign.

And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a thick stack of papers before him on his desk. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple and compelling argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.

The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”

A 15- or 16-week ban — which Mr. Trump was seriously contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory in November. The news media, his advisers told him, would relentlessly portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the G.O.P. over abortion.

On the flight to Grand Rapids, Mr. Trump began dictating the script of a video he would release the following week: He would leave the abortion issue to the states and would not say how many weeks he considered appropriate — disappointing some social conservatives but making it harder for Democrats to use the issue against him.

Mr. Trump’s approach to gender could not have been more different from Ms. Harris’s.

His team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country.

The Trump campaign committed its limited resources, including the candidate’s time, to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image. His first campaign stop after his criminal conviction was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He entered the Republican National Convention one night to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He spent relatively little time doing mainstream media interviews and instead recorded a series of podcast interviews with male comedians and other bro-type personalities who tapped into the kind of audiences Mr. Fabrizio’s data said were most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message.

They included a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, and won Mr. Rogan’s election-eve endorsement. Aides and allies like Mr. Musk made explicit appeals to men to vote for Mr. Trump in the contest’s final hours.

Ms. Harris’s team was trying equally hard to mobilize women in the first national election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, showcasing the stories of women who suffered catastrophic medical emergencies in states where Republicans had enacted strict abortion bans. Michelle Obama made an impassioned case to vote for women’s interests. And there were efforts to encourage wives to ignore their husbands, with sticky notes left in women’s restrooms reminding them that their vote was a secret. The actress Julia Roberts recorded an ad calling the ballot box one of the last places where women still had the freedom to choose.

Mr. Trump was aghast. “Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she’s voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that?” he said on Fox News.

But Mr. Trump declined to call upon Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primaries, as an emissary to female voters. He didn’t think he needed her, and people close to him said he continued to thoroughly dislike her. “You have the issue of abortion,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “Without abortion, the women love me.”

Trump’s gamble on anti-trans ads

About a week after the September debate, Mr. Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Ms. Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates. “Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad.

It was a big bet: Mr. Trump was leading on the two most salient issues in the race — the economy and immigration — yet here he was, intentionally changing the subject.

But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Mr. Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.

So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.

The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.

Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.

The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.

For the Trump team, the transgender attacks — along with other ads showing Ms. Harris laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants — fit into a broader Trump goal: to make her look like a lightweight.

Mr. Trump was already running as a felon. In the eyes of his team, the transgender ads made her look unserious, foolish and outside the political mainstream.

Change and Obama

By early October, the Trump team had been trying for weeks to blunt Ms. Harris’s efforts to portray herself as the change candidate.

The Trump team’s internal polling had showed Ms. Harris succeeding at portraying herself as a change agent in August. She had settled on the slogan “A New Way Forward” and was pressing a generational argument against Mr. Trump, who was vying to become the oldest man ever elected president.

It was one of the most worrying findings for the Trump team in the early weeks of her candidacy.

Then she went on “The View.”

In what was otherwise an anodyne talk-show appearance, Ms. Harris was asked if she would have done something differently from Mr. Biden. She paused, then said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

In their group texts, Trump advisers rejoiced. They were stunned Ms. Harris did not have a ready-made answer to such a foreseeable and strategically important question.

Mr. Blair, the campaign’s political director, told the team they needed to get the clip seen by as many voters as possible.

By that afternoon, up to 10 million voters received text messages containing the clip on their cellphones. Television ads broadcast it to tens of millions more over the following weeks.

How Ms. Harris talked about Mr. Biden was clearly a problem for her. But so was how she talked about Mr. Trump.

At the Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., which was never fully redecorated after the candidate swap, leaving conference rooms covered with images of Mr. Biden’s signature sunglasses, officials continued to debate how the vice president should attack the former president as the short campaign waged on. A broader group of strategists held three meetings on the subject in September and October.

Mr. Trump’s approval ratings were getting rosier despite early predictions that voters would sour on him the more they saw of him.

The Harris campaign’s pollsters seemed to press for a label — “dangerous” — that echoed how Mr. Trump was trying to pigeonhole Ms. Harris ideologically. But the idea ran into opposition, including from Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had tried to brand Mr. Trump as “Dangerous Donald,” but the tactic had flopped then.

Weeks of deliberations left some participants on the Harris team frustrated and exhausted by the inability to reach a decision. Finally, they agreed on what campaign officials described as the “three U’s.”

Unhinged, unstable, unchecked.

Ads featuring that tagline soon followed. But Democratic allies immediately began to second-guess the focus on Mr. Trump’s character. Those doubts grew after Ms. Harris called attention to a report that Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff had said Mr. Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

Republicans argued that calling Mr. Trump a fascist — as Ms. Harris indeed soon did herself — would not persuade anyone.

“I’m sorry, we had him as president for four years — we know he’s not a Nazi,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a close Trump ally. “We know he’s not a fascist.”

Days later, Ms. Harris traveled to the Atlanta area for her first rally with former President Barack Obama.

Her campaign had already announced the location of her closing speech — the Ellipse, where on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump had revved up the crowd that overran the Capitol — and it hinted at her intentions.

Mr. Obama had other ideas.

In a roughly 10-minute talk in a trailer on the campus of a high school, he urged Ms. Harris to infuse her closing argument with more of her biography, to tell the story of who she was in order to get across the kind of president she would be, according to three people briefed on the conversation.

Mr. Obama also spoke with Ms. Harris’s speechwriter, Adam Frankel, who had once worked for him. The share of the speech that focused on Mr. Trump ultimately shrank, two of the people said.

On the final Sunday evening of the campaign, at a rally in East Lansing, Mich., Ms. Harris did not mention Mr. Trump once. It was the first time she had omitted his name from a speech at a campaign rally.

Trump turbulence

Mr. Trump was, as usual, demonstrating who was actually in charge.

Seated aboard his plane in the late summer, he scribbled signed copies of his book for two of his advisers: Ms. Wiles, the woman who had led his 2024 campaign from the very first day, and Corey Lewandowski, who had just recently re-entered the fray after managing Mr. Trump’s 2016 race and getting fired from that job.

Mr. Trump gave copies of the book to each and, in a characteristically over-the-top gesture, asked who got the first book and who got the second one. It was Ms. Wiles, and then Mr. Lewandowski.

“That’s the order,” Mr. Trump said. “One, two.”

That brief behind-the-scenes moment — establishing the pecking order that Ms. Wiles was in charge as his No. 1 — captured the tensions that had been roiling the Trump operation.

Mr. Trump had previously been listening to outside allies who suggested he needed a change and told some associates he feared people might be stealing from him. Mr. Lewandowski had come aboard in August and immediately embarked on a “forensic audit” of the books. He told some people he would be the campaign chairman and began assembling a team of loyalists. (Mr. Lewandowski said he never heard the pecking-order comment from Mr. Trump and denied saying he would have that title.)

The senior team — and ultimately Mr. Trump — closed ranks around Ms. Wiles, but Mr. Lewandowski had nonetheless destabilized the Trump operation at one of its most vulnerable junctures. Mr. Trump’s original team would ultimately stay in charge through a white-knuckle finish.

At one particularly unmoored event, in Lititz, Pa., on the final Sunday, Mr. Trump said he should never have left the White House in the first place and mused approvingly about the prospect of reporters being shot.

Numerous advisers, including Jason Miller and Ms. Wiles, were blunt that day, saying Mr. Trump had created a problem for himself, according to two people briefed on the discussions. Sean Hannity, the Fox News anchor and an old friend of Mr. Trump’s, called him and described how the speech was being received.

Mr. Trump has long chafed at advisers’ efforts to contain him. The next day at a rally, he made a show of stopping himself after calling a young woman “beautiful,” asking aloud to strike it from the record. “So I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I, Susan Wiles?” he asked, in a rare use of her given first name.

Mr. Trump’s capacity to resist handling kept his aides on edge right up to the end.

In just the final 10 days, Mr. Trump promised to be the protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He called himself the “father of fertilization.” He made a crack about Liz Cheney facing battle and standing with nine rifles “trained at her face.” His campaign put a comic’s racist set onstage at Madison Square Garden. And he diverted his campaign plane from the seven main battlegrounds where he had run nearly all his ads to make stops in New Mexico, Virginia and New York, simply because he wanted to.

Some of the Harris team’s final measurements suggested his late wild antics were breaking through and that they believed voters were weighing them against the former president. The election results showed the opposite.

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But the Europeans have a long way to go. A second Trump presidency could serve as a catalyst for Europe to fortify itself in the face of a more undependable America. But it is far from clear the continent is prepared to seize that moment.

With both the French and German governments weakened by domestic politics, a strong European response may be difficult to construct. And even after one term of Mr. Trump and a war in Ukraine, Europeans have been slow to change.

“A Trump victory is very painful for Europeans, as it confronts them with a question they’ve tried hard to hide from: ‘How do we deal with a United States that sees us more as a competitor and a nuisance than a friend to work with?’” said Georgina Wright, deputy director for International Studies at the Institut Montaigne in Paris. “It should unite Europe, but that does not mean Europe necessarily will unite.”

The unpredictability of Mr. Trump — emboldened and empowered by what may be a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress — concerns European allies, since unpredictability cannot be prepared for.

But they also know that Mr. Trump will maintain some clear positions. Those include skepticism for multilateral alliances, an admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and dislike of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.

The Europeans will continue and intensify their efforts to keep lines of communication open to a new Trump administration and the key officials within it, even as they maintain close ties to American legislators who support the trans-Atlantic alliance and NATO.

The main issues are the economy, security and democracy.

When in comes to the economy, the European Union has been planning for months how it might deal with a President Trump.

E.U. officials have put together an initial offer to buy more American goods to try to forestall new tariffs, and drafted reciprocal tariffs on American goods to respond if Mr. Trump does go more protectionist.

On security, there are worries about what a Trump presidency will mean for Ukraine, a war Mr. Trump insists he can end very quickly, and about Mr. Trump’s intermittent threats to withdraw the United States from NATO.

Mr. Trump has been correct and effective in demanding more military spending from Europeans, said Mr. Heisbourg. “But NATO’s Article 5,” a commitment to collective defense, “is not supposed to be a protection racket,” he said. “But that’s Trump’s position, and this time he’ll have more power than he had in the first term.”

Article 5 depends on credibility. Some, like Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO, think Mr. Trump could destroy that credibility and tempt Mr. Putin to test NATO simply by saying that he would not defend any country that does not pay at least NATO’s goal of 2 percent of gross domestic product toward defense.

Currently 23 of 32 member states do pay that amount or more, including those states most vulnerable to Russia, like Poland and the Baltic nations. But there is also general understanding that 2 percent “must be a floor, not a ceiling,” as NATO leaders keep saying, and that countries must spend even more given the Russian threat.

The new NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, a former prime minister in the Netherlands, knows Mr. Trump from his first term, and Mr. Trump has praised him. Mr. Rutte has told Europeans that they must spend more in their own interests, regardless of who the American president is.

At the same time, there have been some efforts to “Trump proof” support for Ukraine.

NATO is taking over the Ukraine Contact Group, which coordinates support for Ukraine, from the United States. NATO countries have promised to deliver at least 40 billion euros, or about $43 billion, to Ukraine next year, the same amount as this one. And the Group of 7 nations have agreed on using billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to provide Ukraine $50 billion for next year.

Poland and other countries of Central Europe, including the Baltic nations and Hungary, had a good relationship with Mr. Trump during his first term.

The foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in Warsaw that he was in regular contact with security advisers around Mr. Trump. But Europe, he said, “urgently needs to take more responsibility for its security with increased defense spending.”

He vowed that “Poland will be a leader in strengthening Europe’s resilience.”

That would be best done in cooperation with Britain, France and Germany, said Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. But like Mr. Heisbourg, she said that the weakness of the French and German governments can undermine that goal, and that Europeans may instead try to make bilateral deals with Mr. Trump, as they did last time.

“There is little leadership in Europe, and Europe can’t be led by the Commission or by the European Union institutions,” she said, referring to the bloc’s bureaucracy in Brussels, “but only by its strongest members.”

But Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany chose to prioritize his close relationship with President Biden and has not invested in Europe.

Paralyzed and divided, the governing coalition in Berlin collapsed Wednesday night. “Germany is seen as a problem in Europe now,” she said.

Most importantly, Ms. Puglierin said, “We in Europe must confront a lifetime illusion, thinking that Trump was the real aberration and overlooking the deep structural changes in America,” including the shift toward Asia and a growing fatigue with its global responsibilities. “So this is an election that Europeans should take very seriously,” she said.

The German government’s trans-Atlantic coordinator, Michael Link, said Trump’s re-election meant that both the European Union and the European pillar of NATO had to be strengthened and avoid divisions.

“We can’t just passively wait for what Trump will do, or what Putin will do,” he told German radio. But he also said that Europeans must “make clear what we expect of the U.S., that it must fulfill its NATO obligations, and that if it disengages from Ukraine, in the end that would only help China. That if Russia wins in Ukraine, China wins, too.”

There is also concern about democratic values and the rule of law, and Mr. Trump’s evident admiration for those he considers strong leaders, like Mr. Putin, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Xi Jinping of China.

Mr. Trump is seen as the standard-bearer for those populist center-right and right-wing leaders in Europe like Mr. Orban, who has established what he calls an “illiberal democracy,” as well as Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.

His victory is inevitably going to inspire them and encourage others to duplicate more nationalist and less liberal policies built on stopping unwanted migration and on protectionism.

Europe is already seeing a decline in support for democratic, liberal, progressive values and the rise of extremist parties on the right. Mr. Trump’s victory will embolden them and weaken Europe’s coherence and its voice.

“Spreading liberal values is a lot harder when the president of the largest democracy, the United States, openly contests them,” Ms. Wright said.

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Many of his policy prescriptions remain vague or change in detail depending on his mood or the day. But if he follows through on his campaign trail talk, he would restructure the government to make it more partisan, further cut taxes while imposing punishing tariffs on foreign goods, expand energy production, pull the United States back from overseas alliances, reverse longstanding health rules, prosecute his adversaries and round up theoretically millions of people living in the country illegally.

“We’re going to do the best job,” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech. “We’re going to turn it around. It’s got to be turned around. It’s got to be turned around fast, and we’re going to turn it around. We’re going to do it in every way with so many ways, but we’re going to do it in every way. This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”

Having promised to devote his next four years in office to “retribution,” Mr. Trump plans to quickly shield himself from legal scrutiny, end criminal investigations against himself, pardon supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and turn the power of federal law enforcement against his adversaries.

He has said he will fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has brought indictments against him for mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election, and he has threatened to investigate President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and others who have angered him, including Republicans like Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming.

Such a move would end the post-Watergate norm that the White House is not supposed to interfere in prosecutors’ investigation and charging decisions. Should he follow through, Mr. Trump would be bolstered both by a legal blueprint developed by his allies while he was out of office for increasing direct presidential control of the Justice Department, and by the ruling by the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices last summer that granted presidents substantial immunity from prosecution based on their core official acts.

In a sign of how focused Mr. Trump is on the Justice Department, Vice President-elect JD Vance has called attorney general the most important job in government after the president. And he may fire Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director he appointed in 2017 but proved insufficiently loyal in his mind.

Mr. Trump has also vowed to curb the professional ranks of civil servants in government, what he has called the deep state. At the end of his first term, he issued an executive order to allow as many as 50,000 more senior civil servants to be fired and replaced with political loyalists. Mr. Biden rescinded it before it took effect, so it has never been tested in court.

But Mr. Trump is likely to reissue it in his second administration after first rolling back regulations the Biden administration put in place to slow down such a move, a change that would transform an ostensibly nonpartisan government into a tool of his political will. Once that is accomplished, many other changes would in theory be that much easier to enact.

Domestic policy

No single promise electrified Mr. Trump’s crowds more than his vow of “mass deportations” of immigrants, a blitz of expulsions that would be unparalleled in modern times.

Among other things, Mr. Trump wants to expand the use of expedited removal hearings without due process — now used only for people caught shortly after crossing the border — to deport undocumented immigrants from all across the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States longer than two years. His chief immigration policy adviser has said that the government will use military funds to build large detention camps in Texas to hold people as their cases are processed.

Mr. Trump has also promised a return to many of his signature policies aimed at closing America’s borders: deporting unaccompanied migrant children crossing illegally, reviving a program that forced migrants to stay in Mexico for their U.S. asylum cases and limiting migration from several Muslim-majority countries.

At the same time, he intends to rein in other law enforcement agencies. He is likely to reverse almost of all of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s major initiatives, sidelining the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and scuttling or slow-walking investigations of misconduct, racism and discrimination in local and state police and corrections departments.

Few agencies face a future quite as uncertain as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is responsible for gun regulations. Under Steven Dettelbach, the director appointed by Mr. Biden, the bureau has cracked down on conversion devices that allow guns to fire more rapidly and deadly homemade firearms known as “ghost guns,” while leveraging existing law to increase the number of background checks conducted on prospective buyers.

All of those efforts are likely to be limited or rolled back entirely, and it is possible that Mr. Trump could refuse to even appoint a permanent successor to Mr. Dettelbach, leaving the bureau without Senate-confirmed leadership.

Mr. Trump’s return to power could lead to significant upheaval for millions of Americans dependent on the Affordable Care Act, after record levels of enrollment under Mr. Biden. Increased subsidies could expire next year without action from congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump, causing premiums to spike.

A second Trump administration could also deliver major changes to Medicaid and Medicare. Federal health officials could approve controversial work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries, forcing millions of people to work, volunteer or attend school to qualify for health care. Some former Trump advisers have also called for rethinking programs in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, including Medicare’s new power to directly negotiate drug prices.

Mr. Trump has also said he would empower Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to rethink longstanding health care policies. Mr. Kennedy, a lawyer with no medical or public health degrees, has long promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has already signaled other ideas to pursue that were once out of the mainstream. Among them would be advising localities to remove fluoride from water despite decades of experience showing it helps protect teeth.

On abortion, Mr. Trump recently said he opposed congressional legislation to restrict access nationwide. But he has broad power to limit abortions through executive power alone. His Food and Drug Administration could restrict or even revoke the approval of medications used in most abortions. And he could advocate aggressive enforcement of a 19th-century anti-vice law to ban the mailing of materials used in abortions.

Mr. Trump has also said he would dismantle the Education Department entirely, a promise Republicans have made since Ronald Reagan without success. Mr. Trump has railed against the department for enforcing rules extending greater protections to transgender students and has seized on college campus protests over the war in Gaza as a sign that liberal voices have overtaken conservative ones in higher education.

The new president could spin off the department’s student aid office, which holds a roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio, into a new entity, as his former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has proposed. To abolish the department outright, Mr. Trump would need support from Congress, and some Republicans might balk.

Economic policy

Mr. Trump has laid out a plan for extraordinary change to the country’s trade and economic policies, starting with imposing a universal tariff, or tax, on most imported goods. The idea is to raise their prices so that domestic manufacturers of rival goods can better compete, protecting factory jobs. Such a policy could ignite a global trade war, damaging American exports if foreign trading partners impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods.

Mr. Trump vowed in particular to try to wrench apart the U.S. economic relationship with China — a turbulent change for the world’s two largest economies, which exchange about $750 billion in goods and services each year. He has said he would “enact aggressive new restrictions on Chinese ownership” of assets in the United States, bar Americans from investing in China and eventually ban Chinese-made goods like electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.

Mr. Trump campaigned on a mix of ambitious tax cuts, often laid out in only a few words, including ending taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits. At several points, he even suggested ending income taxes, the nation’s primary source of revenue. Those ideas face a potentially skeptical Congress, even under Republican control, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers are already looking at ways to scale back the potential cost of his tax agenda.

His most important priority with taxes will be to extend the cuts he signed into law the last time he was in the White House. Many of those provisions, including popular measures like a larger standard deduction, expire at the end of next year. Simply continuing them would be expensive, and some Republican lawmakers have puzzled over how to avoid blowing a huge hole in the budget.

Mr. Trump has also said he would expand domestic drilling for oil and gas, although those are already at record levels under the Biden administration. That could mean expanding drilling permits in the Alaskan wilderness. And he has said he would revive and expand his first-term effort to cut back on federal regulations.

While lower energy costs and fewer regulations could cut back on production costs, other elements of his agenda — raising tariffs, mass deportations of low-wage laborers and cutting taxes in an economy that is already at full employment — would create upward pressure on prices. If inflation rises again, that would in turn put pressure on the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates, making it harder for people to borrow and afford mortgages.

That would conflict with Mr. Trump’s vow to bring down interest rates. He has said that he will not fire Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, but he could exert pressure on the central bank in other ways over the coming years. He will have a chance to replace at least a few officials on the Fed’s seven-member board in Washington.

One adviser has publicly suggested that Mr. Trump should announce whom he would nominate to replace Mr. Powell much earlier than the end of his term in 2026. As long as Wall Street believed that the “shadow” Fed chair would in fact eventually be confirmed, investors might begin to anticipate lower interest rates — and the mere expectation would bring mortgage rates and business borrowing rates down, or so the theory goes.

National security

All of those initiatives, at least, will wait until Mr. Trump takes office. He set a far more ambitious, and problematic, goal for himself during the campaign when he repeatedly claimed that he would broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine even before Inauguration Day. Such a negotiation, he said again and again, would be completed within 24 hours.

What he never said was how he would accomplish such a goal, and few if any with experience in national security outside his circle see that as even remotely possible. The only way to swiftly end the war, specialists said, would be to force the Ukrainians into a bad deal by cutting off their military support and allowing Russia to keep the roughly 20 percent of the country it has seized through force.

Not only would Ukraine presumably refuse to go along with such a deal, so would America’s European allies, which are heavily invested in the war and have their own interest in not rewarding Russia for naked aggression. But even if the conflict is not ended by Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump will have tremendous leverage to try to impose his own resolution once he is in office. And that resolution is expected to favor Russia, whose president, Vladimir V. Putin, he has praised as a “genius.”

What Mr. Trump plans to do about the other major war consuming Washington is even less clear. While he has blamed Mr. Biden’s supposed weakness for the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 on Israel, Mr. Trump has said little about what Israel should now do about its yearlong war in Gaza, its recent escalation in Lebanon and its exchange of airstrikes with Iran.

His extensive support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in his first term has led many to expect him to be an unqualified supporter of Israel’s approach, and he has criticized Mr. Biden for not sufficiently standing by the Jewish state. But Mr. Trump has also publicly called on Israel to end the war because it has been a public relations problem.

And his once-strong personal relationship with Mr. Netanyahu soured in 2020, particularly after the Israeli prime minister congratulated Mr. Biden on his election victory. So it is not a given that Mr. Trump will give Mr. Netanyahu carte blanche. Mr. Trump is expected to take a harder line on Iran than Mr. Biden has, and resume closer relations with Arab allies, seeking to reach the deal that eluded his predecessor to establish normal diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

At home, Mr. Trump is expected to go after what he has complained is a “woke” Pentagon — one that has pushed through initiatives aimed at inclusivity, like restoring the names of military bases that were previously named after Confederate generals. Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, could return to being called Fort Bragg, for instance.

The new president could reinstate a ban on transgender people serving in the military and might also aim to get rid of policies aimed at helping troops get access to abortion. He has also made clear that he does not like training programs in the military that target racial or sexual discrimination.

Mr. Trump wanted to move American troops out of Germany, Syria and South Korea during his first term, only to be thwarted by advisers, so he may try that again. Some Trump allies have suggested that he may seek to move American troops in Germany to Poland or bring them home from Europe altogether.

He also wanted to use the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty American troops into the streets to subdue protesters after the police killing of George Floyd, only to back down after resistance by military leaders. During the campaign, Mr. Trump suggested that in a second term he would be more aggressive about following through in the event of other protests that he does not like.

Reporting was contributed by Devlin Barrett, Helene Cooper, Adam Goldman, Zach Montague, Margot Sanger-Katz, Jeanna Smialek, Ana Swanson, Glenn Thrush, Hamed Aleaziz and Noah Weiland.

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“We know there are still thousands of ballots outstanding that have not been counted or even received yet because they’re in the mail or they’re in the drop boxes,” Ms. Rosen said Tuesday night, after it was clear that a winner would not be declared.

On Tuesday evening, once the first results were released, Ms. Rosen took a narrow lead. But then as more ballots rolled in, the race tightened. And after ballots from a rural Nevada county were reported on Wednesday morning, Mr. Brown led at one point by nearly 6,000 votes.

That margin has since shrunk, with both sides eyeing what’s left in favorable counties.

One of the state’s larger rural areas, Nye County, still had more than 10,000 mail ballots left to count as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Arnold Knightly, a county spokesman. These ballots are expected to favor Mr. Brown.

“We’re running them now and we’re going to run them another hour and a half, and then whatever we get done, we’ll get done,” Mr. Knightly said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. “Part of the challenge is, this is a huge county, so to run the ballots from Pahrump up to Tonopah is three hours, that’s 167 miles.”

Tonopah, the county seat, is an old silver mining town. Back in 1982, an article in The New York Times described it as a place “built for the business and pleasure of miners, where gamblers, desert amateurs and motoring funlovers are asked to fit in as best they can.”

“We will see what the final results are, but this has been quite a journey. I am just filled with so much love,” Mr. Brown, an Army veteran who survived a blast from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and has never held elected office, said in a video posted to X Wednesday morning.

The race will not decide which party controls the Senate; the Republicans already recaptured the chamber after victories in Ohio and Montana.

At the moment, Mr. Brown is running almost 60,000 votes behind President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is comfortably leading Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada — though most outlets, including The Associated Press and NBC News, have yet to call the race. Coming into Election Day, The New York Times polling average showed the race tied, and each candidate visited the state multiple times in the campaign’s final months.

Only one of the state’s House races has been called — a Republican incumbent, Representative Mark Amodei, has won his contest. In the other races, three Democratic incumbents were leading as of Wednesday.

Ms. Rosen is banking on an influx of mail ballots from Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, and is traditionally a Democratic stronghold. Voters who submit ballots by mail also are more often Democrats.

But it is unclear how many of those ballots might eventually come in. Lorena Portillo, the county’s registrar of voters, said on Wednesday that her office had 55,000 mail ballots that were dropped off on Election Day or received in the mail on Tuesday. These ballots still need to be verified and counted, and more flowing in for days will be eligible for counting. Ms. Portillo said she hoped to provide another update Wednesday evening.

Washoe County, Nev. — which includes Reno, the state’s third most-populous city — is slightly favoring Ms. Rosen. She held onto that advantage after the county released results for about 13,000 ballots on Wednesday night, with county officials still counting about 30,000 ballots.

Who won the Senate race could take several days to figure out. Under Nevada law, mail ballots postmarked on Election Day can be counted up until 5 p.m. local time on Saturday. Ballots with no postmark or one that’s unclear can be counted up until 5 p.m. on Friday.

If the results remain razor tight, uncertainty here in the Silver State will be compounded by the ballots that need fixing if they are to be counted, which numbered roughly 13,000 as of Wednesday morning. Mail-in ballots are generally rejected when a voter’s signature on the envelope does not match the one in a voter registration database.

Voters in Nevada have until Nov. 12 to fix, or “cure,” problematic ballots, further delaying the determination of the outcome. Both parties are expected to put canvassers in the field to encourage voters with rejected ballots to take the necessary steps to cure them.

But the counties also reached out to voters.

“We try every which way,” said Ms. Portillo, during a news conference on Tuesday night. “If we have the email, we try the email,” she said, as well as sending a letter. “If we have a phone number, we also send robocalls to the voter, and we’re doing that every single day. If they’re on the list, we’re going to go ahead and send that to them every single day up until Nov. 12.”

In 2022, when Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, won re-election by just 7,928 votes, there were 7,074 mail ballots that needed curing. About 3,000 ballots were successfully cured, of which 42 percent ended up Democratic, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office.

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She is not alone. The New York Times spoke with two other voters in Montgomery County, and a third in Philadelphia, who had similar experiences and had to rush back to Pennsylvania at the last minute to vote.

Ms. Wu provided 12 emails documenting her efforts to obtain a mail-in ballot, as well as screenshots from Pennsylvania’s voter portal. They show that she requested her ballot on Sept. 10, that it was marked as sent, and then that it was marked as “CANC – UNDELIVERABLE.”

She requested another one, but the request was rejected because she had already requested the first, “undeliverable” one. That happened multiple times. After several attempts to contact the Montgomery County voter services offices, she heard back from someone who told her she needed to file a form to cancel the first request. She did that on Oct. 28 — less than five hours after being told to — but did not receive confirmation that the cancellation form had been received until Oct. 30.

On Monday, Nov. 4, now thoroughly panicked, she tried to contact the county voter services office again. This time, she received a response that her ballot would arrive within “24 to 48 hours” — too late for her to return it in time.

She went and bought the plane ticket.

A friend of hers, Malana Li, 23, lives in Philadelphia but often travels to New York for work, and she is in New York now. She requested a mail-in ballot on Sept. 24 and received an email on Sept. 25, which she provided to The Times, confirming that her application had been approved; she then received another on Sept. 27 saying her ballot was about to be mailed. Nonetheless, like Ms. Wu’s ballot, Ms. Li’s never arrived.

“To the best of our knowledge these were isolated incidents,” Kevin Feeley, a representative for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, said in an email.

Montgomery County officials did not comment. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office also did not comment.

A third woman, Tara Mehta, 26, also splits her time between her home in Montgomery County and New York and had a similar experience to Ms. Li’s. For her, returning to Pennsylvania to vote in person wasn’t a major inconvenience, but there was “just a lot of uncertainty and unnecessary panic it created,” she said.

Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s accounts follow an account earlier on Tuesday from Lexi Harder, who is registered to vote in Montgomery County but is studying in Berlin. Ms. Harder told The Times that she had paid more than $1,100 to fly home on Tuesday after the absentee ballot she had submitted was returned to her on Saturday.

Multiple other people posted about similar experiences on social media, including in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa, though The Times has not independently verified their accounts as it did Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s.

John Yoon contributed reporting.

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Mr. Vindman, 49, who goes by Eugene, is a Soviet immigrant who worked as a legal adviser on the National Security Council. He came to national prominence in 2019 alongside his twin brother, Alexander, when the two gave whistle-blower accounts of President Donald J. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine that formed the basis of an impeachment case against him.

Mr. Vindman’s victory put him in line to succeed Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and former intelligence officer who vacated the seat to run for governor.

The race pitted two Army veterans, both lawyers, against each other, and featured specialized pitches to the district’s large contingent of veterans and federal employees.

Mr. Anderson, a former Green Beret who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, tried to cast Mr. Vindman as an extreme liberal, citing his support for electric vehicle mandates. He also accused Mr. Vindman of being on a “revenge tour” for his firing from the government. Mr. Vindman, in turn, leaned on his impeachment back story in the race, arguing that democracy itself was at stake in the contest.

Mr. Vindman also tried to paint Mr. Anderson as an acolyte of Project 2025, the hard right’s sweeping plan for passing conservative policies and restructuring the federal government. He argued that the plan could jeopardize veterans’ benefits and federal workers’ job security.

Mr. Anderson repeatedly disavowed the project. And he insisted that he would not support a federal ban on abortion, rejecting a charge used by Mr. Vindman and many other Democrats in competitive campaigns this year to highlight Republicans’ opposition to abortion rights.

Mr. Vindman also criticized Mr. Anderson for campaign photos and videos that appeared to show him sitting around a dining table with his wife and three daughters — but turned out to be of the candidate with a female friend and her three daughters. Democrats accused Mr. Anderson of trying to peddle a “fake family” to voters and said he could not be trusted. Mr. Anderson, who is unmarried and has no children, said he had never claimed that those pictured were his family members.

As Republicans in the region celebrated Mr. Trump’s performance, which cleared his path back to the White House and proved that his 2016 victories there were no one-off, Democrats were faced with a fractured base and urgent questions about their path forward.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of conversations in the days ahead about next steps and what comes next,” said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, a Democrat, adding, “as I’ve personally reflected on things and talked to folks, people are very concerned about their pocketbook.”

Great Lakes Democrats have been here before and rebounded. After Mr. Trump’s 2016 victories brought another round of liberal introspection, Democrats dominated the 2018 midterm elections by winning back governorships and congressional seats. President Biden continued that momentum by carrying all three Blue Wall states in 2020, and his party had another solid election in 2022.

But the results on Tuesday pointed to more fundamental questions about the old Democratic coalition in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump had aggressively courted many of the blue-collar white voters, including union members, who had long sided with Democrats. And he made inroads this year with young men, Arab Americans and Black voters, also longstanding parts of the Democratic base.

“I think we’re witnessing, in real time, a political realignment,” said State Representative Bill G. Schuette, a Michigan Republican who led his party’s legislative campaign effort in the state this year, and said Mr. Trump’s willingness to visit traditionally Democratic places like Detroit and Dearborn helped build support.

Representative Hillary Scholten, a Democrat who won re-election on Tuesday in a historically conservative part of West Michigan, said there were still reasons for electoral hope in her party. Democrats narrowly held Senate seats in Michigan and Wisconsin, while a race in Pennsylvania remained too close to call.

Still, Ms. Scholten said the Democrats’ economic message was in urgent need of an overhaul.

“We got too lost in the data and weren’t listening enough to the American people about how they were feeling,” she said. “You try to tell a working mom of four kids that she shouldn’t be worried about the economy because the G.D.P. looks really strong, she’s going to say, ‘Get out of here, you don’t understand.’”

In the buildup to the election, Democrats used the Blue Wall as a sort of electoral battle cry, urging Vice President Kamala Harris’s supporters to knock on doors and convince their friends to vote in a region that pollsters had said provided her most straightforward path to the presidency.

Over the weekend, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan told a crowd of canvassers that she was “confident Michigan is going to show the world that we are a strong part of the Blue Wall that is intact.”

It was not to be.