Extra: Why President-elect Trump Won, And The Democrats Lost.
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This is the Fox News Rundown Extra.

I'm Lisa Brady. President-elect Donald Trump has made history again, becoming just the second former president to lose re-election and come back and win four years later. Leading up to Tuesday, for months, polls suggested the race was neck and neck and Americans prepared for a nail-biter, not knowing an outcome for days. But it turned out Trump actually won decisively early Wednesday morning, pulling off an Electoral College landslide.

So how did the Trump campaign manage such a win? Hours after Trump declared victory in his home state of Florida, Jessica Rosenthal spoke with Mark Lauder, a former Trump advisor who was the strategic communications director of President-elect Trump's 2020 campaign. Lauder discussed the campaign's strategy and why he thinks the Democrats misread the American people. He also looked ahead to what a second Trump administration may look like and tackle in its early days.

We often have to cut interviews down for time during the week, but you might like to hear the full interview. Thanks for listening. And please follow the weekday rundown podcast if you haven't already. Now, here's Mark Lauder on the Fox News Rundown Extra. Mark, first, I want to start with a question specific to Vice President Harris.

What do you think happened for her? I know there will be a lot of discussion, postmortems, autopsies and all kinds of analyses. But was it just your gut instinct? Was it the truncated campaign? Was it some of the verbiage campaign surrogates use? What do you think specifically about either Vice President Harris or the campaign that didn't work?

Well, I think the fundamental problem was the fundamental problem that every vice president who is seeking to be directly elected as the next president has faced since the last 180, 90 years is that people have to want a third term or in this case, a second term of the president. It's only happened once in the last 188 years, if I recall, and that was George H.W. Bush because people wanted a third term of Ronald Reagan.

Al Gore couldn't pull it off. Vice President Harris couldn't pull it off because 75% of the American people think our country's on the wrong track. Exit polls show around 70% of the American people yesterday were angry or unsatisfied with the current state of where America is. And when you're the sitting vice president of the United States, you have a problem when you can't say what you would have done differently.

Why you didn't do something differently because you were in office and then try to make the case that you are the agent of change that they want to change from. So incumbency kind of got put upon her in a negative way of something. A lot of times we talk about incumbency, the power of incumbency. In this case, it she she had to bear that as a burden.

Yeah, that's my general belief because every vice president who wants to be directly elected as the next president, you want the good things from the previous administration, but you don't want the bad. And when you have so many American people thinking that our country is on the wrong track, it's hard to distance yourself. And then because of her own bad answers when she was asked, what would you do differently? And she said nothing.

Well, that's a problem for people when they're walking into the to the voting booth. I know people like you were being peppered with questions about the president elects

comments that he made in the days up before Election Day. Things like, you know, that the biggest threat is the far left calling them the enemy from within the comedian joke about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage. The criticisms that came along with that. I know you were asked about those as they were happening. Those moments don't seem to have mattered.

No, and I think a lot of the things – I think some of the exit polling – and we'll need to see more details and more data as it comes in – shows that most Americans made up their minds well over a month ago and not in the closing days, which I think was a fundamental problem for the Harris campaign is that they kept changing their narrative. First it was joy and vibes. Then it was they're fascists, they're Nazis.

Then it was, you know, trying to catch on to whatever controversy they could they could gin up every single day until the final three or four days. It was back to kind of a hope and vibes kind of an idea. And so you never really got a narrative from them where the one fundamental difference. And it's also the problem we faced in 2020 when taking on then Vice President Biden.

Biden, is that Kamala didn't have a record. We did. In this case, people remembered that things were more affordable. The border was more secure. The world was safer when Donald Trump was in the White House. And so he was actually running, in my estimation, an incumbent campaign, even though he wasn't the incumbent. She was more like the challenger and she was the incumbent. It was a very odd dynamic.

Because of the unique circumstances of that election. Yeah, it was so unique. We went from seeing people like Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Tim Scott on stage with the former president. Fast forward to seeing the head of the UFC, Dana White, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr. surrounding him. How much did the coalition matter here in this in this election?

Well, I think it mattered greatly because when we looked at the numbers coming in as they were coming in Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, you were seeing that not only was Donald Trump – and I'll use a McDonald's reference because it was a great photo – supersizing his 2016 strategy of deriving more and more support out of traditionally rural areas or traditionally red areas, but then he was cutting into –

the traditional Democrat voting blocs. And it wasn't by a massive number, except with Latinos. It was 1 or 2%, 3% in Philadelphia, 3% in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It was cutting the margin in New York State from, say, 5 million down to 3 million or 2 million. Those are the kinds of little things that you saw pop up in all of the battleground states where he was

bringing out even more support in red areas and just slightly

by a couple two three percentage points reducing the margin her margin in the blue areas and that's what you needed to win the election overall and what it looks like right now likely to be the national popular vote fox news radio on demand on the fox news app download the app and just click listen when you swipe left you can listen to your favorite fox news talk shows live swipe right for the latest fox news radio newscasts on demand fox news radio on the fox news app download it today

Our Fox News voter analysis showed that 23 percent of black men went for former President Trump, President-elect Trump. He didn't even do as poorly with women as we were told he might. I think he did even I guess more women went for Biden than went for even Vice President Harris. What why do you think this happened? Does it go to your first answer about sort of the wrong track? Or is there something deeper that you guys are looking at?

Well, I think it's twofold. I think first off, I think the wrong track number is, you know, a dominant feature of the electorate. But secondly, I think we are seeing the and I'm going to say fingers crossed, hopefully the destruction of identity of identity politics that you no longer have to vote a certain way based on the boxes you check on the census form that regardless of your race, your gender, your background, that you

you vote for the policy or the person that you think will best deliver for your family, your business, your personal finances, or what your concerns are. And so I think we're starting to see that with, especially when it comes to Hispanic voters, we saw it obviously with black voters. And I do think we saw it with, with women voters, many in the Democrats and then left thought it was a single issue that was dominating the

And while, yes, there are single issue voters, women who vote solely on the abortion issue on both sides, I think the vast majority of women are nuanced on many different policy issues. And whether it was on the security concerns about the border or the inflation and the economy, I think those were the driving features. And once again, well, even if you don't like the way he tweets or somehow how many name calls,

You can't afford not to vote for him because things cost less. The border was secure. Well, let's talk about the future. What would you anticipate for a first 100 days of a second Trump term? Is he focused on the border? Are we getting Elon Musk going with the whole government efficiency initiative? Like what's the big focus, I guess, in the beginning?

Yeah, well, I want to be very clear. I do not speak for the former president-elect or his transition or anything along those lines, but I think he's made it very clear. First and foremost, he wants to get American energy moving again because that is one of the quickest and easiest ways to deal with inflation.

When you lower the cost of energy, you lower the cost of making things, harvesting things, transporting things, and that will be passed along to consumers. But Mark, wait, I got to stop you there for a second. I've been confused about this. We're producing more oil and gas now this year than we even did in 2019. The production has been booming, right? Yeah.

Well, the production is higher, but the rate of growth slowed considerably. And so even though it is higher than it was in 2020, it didn't keep up with the pace of growth that we previously had. And then we also have a refining problem. And so refining capacity is down dramatically.

because of overregulation by the government. And so even though we're pumping more oil, we're not able to as quickly and easily and cheaply transition it into gas and diesel. So there's a number of issues there. And I think even just the regulatory reform will give a signal to the energy companies that they can get back to exploring, get back to doing the other things, which will eventually lower costs.

So first and foremost, that obviously working with Congress, we don't know who is going to control the House of Representatives yet. So that will

likely change things. Obviously, the Trump tax cuts, some of them are expiring. They need to be extended. And then obviously, I think getting tough on the border, clearly the president has made that as a top priority. And in many of these cases, it's just taking the shackles that were placed on the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents to do their jobs. When you have millions of people who have already

Coming to this country, gone through the legal system, gone through their appeals in order to be removed by a judge, and yet they're not being removed. And then you also have the criminal alien that has been so highly talked about. They can take quick action on a lot of those things while we work on a longer-term plan to getting back to the secured border and dealing with the immigration problem overall.

OK, just a couple more for you. I'm asking you this question knowing that you are not necessarily part of a Trump transition team. You're not a part of the administration. I'm just wondering, based on your opinion, based on what you know of the former president and the fact that he has said that.

He believes he could solve the Russia-Ukraine conflict in a day, even before he takes office. Would you, based on what you know of him, expect to see him make this effort even before he takes office to try and talk to Putin and Zelensky and do something here? Well, two things on that. Obviously, with that caveat that I don't speak for him. You know, one thing that they know is that he is a known quantity.

whether it's Zelensky, whether it's Putin, they know the kind of leader they're going to get in President Trump again. And so this can be a highly motivating factor to get the two sides to a negotiating table to figure out what needs to be done to end this conflict because they know that once he actually gets there on January 20th, he has levers that he may be able to pull

And I mean from a negotiating standpoint to

to bring them to the table and deal with this conflict. The same thing I would say holds true in the Middle East with Israel and then obviously Iran and its terror proxies. They know what they're getting with President Trump. And so it might be in their best interest to get these things taken care of before he has to get there and take care of them himself. Okay, Mark, interesting. Just your final thoughts about the trajectory here. We went from January 6th

All the legal cases, the indictments, the impeachments to this moment with not only the former president winning, winning bigger, it appears, than he did in 2016 with a Republican Senate, possibly even a Republican House. Are you is your head spinning?

You know, well, I'm not going to say it's spinning because, you know, the polls had indicated this for a while. I was naturally optimistic, but also cautious because the polls have been wrong so much. You know, you didn't almost want to believe it. And it might be too good to be true. The one thing I think it should send a message, though, is that.

I think this is the American people, and they said it in 16. I think they're saying it again in 2024, that they do not want the elites from the Acela Corridor in New York City, in Washington, D.C., to stop telling us who we have to support. Stop telling us that we have to reflect your views, that you are a representative, an elected representative of us.

And that we, the people, want our leaders to address the to reflect our views, not the other way around. Mark Lauder, former special assistant to now president elect Donald Trump. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you for having me.

Thank you, sir, so much for your time. Appreciate it.

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