Democrats underestimated the Trump tribe's breadth to their detriment. "I think you miss some of the Trump quotient (in polls) because these folks come out of the woodwork, and they're out of the woods and waters of South Carolina," says former GOP Representative Mark Sanford, a Trump critic whose Charleston-area district Republicans took back on Nov. 3. Despite putting more than $100 million behind Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, Democrats fell short of defeating Senator Lindsey Graham by double digits. "These Trump rallies and Trump parades and all those kinds of things, they don't strike me as the type that would be answering a polling call," Sanford says.

Having made the decision to forgo traditional feld organizing, Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon instead turned the Biden campaign into what may be the largest digital-organizing machine in American political history. "Jen O'Malley Dillon took a risk in investing as much in digital acquisition as she did," says Patrick Stevenson, chief mobilization officer at the Democratic National Committee. "You're putting down $1 million in April that you're expecting to show back up as $5 million in August." By September, the digital operation was printing money. Digital organizers recruited more than 200,000 volunteers and deployed them on hundreds of millions of text messages and phone calls. But the result raises questions about whether this virtual juggernaut could really substitute for oldfashioned face-to-face campaigning.

What comes next is anybody's guess. There are 2 1/2 months until the next Inauguration. A lame-duck President with the world's biggest platform, an even larger ego, and millions of supporters who internalized his rhetoric about election "rigging" could stir a lot of trouble on his way out of town. So much, including the odds of violence erupting, depends on Trump's rhetoric in the days and weeks to come.

Then there is the question of tapping the federal treasury on the way out—his companies and family have pocketed millions in government funds during his time in office—and whether he might seek to pardon himself and his allies. "His impulse might be to abuse executive authority, and my hope and prayer is that those around him would restrain him, though they haven't been very successful so far," says Tom Ridge, the GOP former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security Secretary who endorsed Biden. "I have never felt that this President has ever truly respected the Constitution, the rule of law and the freedoms embodied in our democratic process."

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