CAMBRIDGE — Baffled at times and often bitter, more than two dozen of the country’s top political operatives grappled with questions that have dominated American politics for 18 months: What explains Donald Trump’s astonishing political success and what, if anything, could they have done to stop it?
Campaign managers for Trump’s defeated Republican primary rivals blamed their losses on media coverage they saw as unfair. Aides to Hillary Clinton talked of racism, sexism and what they saw as unprecedented interference in the election by FBI Director James B. Comey.
Trump’s own aides cited a feckless inability of the other Republicans to mount a serious campaign against him until it was too late.
Nearly all, however, agreed on one point — a factor that could prove crucial to whether Trump succeeds as the nation’s 45th president: his seemingly unbreakable bond with his core supporters, no matter how provocative his words or deeds.
The venue was the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which, since 1992, has invited top aides from the winning and losing campaigns to spend a day and a half after each presidential election answering questions about what they did and why.
Aides to Trump and Clinton clashed angrily Thursday as the Democrats accused Trump of having used racial prejudice and “dog whistles” to power his victory.
“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, declared after Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, praised his strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.
Bannon previously ran Breitbart News, which has helped give prominence to the so-called “alt-right,” a movement that pushes racist views.
“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Palmieri said.
“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white, working-class voters?” Conway shot back. “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”
Tensions among the Republicans remained only slightly less raw. Over and over, aides to Trump’s defeated GOP rivals complained of their inability to break through Trump’s domination of media coverage.
From the day Trump announced his candidacy through to the final stage of the primary season, “there were only two weeks that he didn’t get more media impressions than all the other candidates’ paid and free media combined,” said Terry Sullivan, the campaign manager for Sen. Marco Rubio, referring to campaign ads and mentions on news programs.
At the same time, the Democratic primary battle between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was exposing her weakness among a key bloc of voters the Democrats needed — those younger than 30. It was a shortcoming Clinton never fully overcame.
Aides to Trump and Clinton agreed that the Democrat led the general election race coming into the final weeks after the three debates. At that point, polls began to show Trump gaining ground as Republicans who had flirted with third parties started returning to him.
Benenson and Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, blamed Comey’s announcement that the FBI was examining a new cache of emails that might be related to Clinton’s handling of classified data. Ultimately, the renewed probe yielded nothing for investigators, but it had a critical influence on a small but key slice of voters.