Here’s what the Trump campaign credits for its victory
Plus: Pantone’s muted Mocha Mousse is its Color of the Year 2025
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at what Trump’s top campaign staff said at this year’s Harvard forum and how Pantone’s pick for Color of the Year 2025 is part of a larger shift away from bright, vibrant colors.
Scroll to the end to see: which Trump appointee is also a fashion blogger 👢
Here’s what the Trump campaign credits for its victory
Believe it or not, the Trump campaign credits its win with staying on message.
President-elect Donald Trump may be known for going off script, but his campaign staff says it was laser focused. “We had a strategy,” Trump’s chief pollster Tony Fabrizio said at last week’s Harvard University Institute of Politics forum, and they stuck to it. “Sticking to a strategy is one of the toughest things in a campaign because you have so many competing interests and so many things coming at you fast.”
Top members of Trump’s campaign staff spoke last week with staff from Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign at the Harvard forum, a tradition that brings together campaign managers from rival campaigns for a sort of postmortem that’s been conducted after every presidential election since 1972, with the exception of the 2020 election.
Fabrizio said the Trump campaign was focused on picking off enough voters from various demographic groups to build their coalition, particularly young men, and they tailored their campaign accordingly.
“Going to MMA fights is not just because [Trump] enjoys going to MMA fights,” Fabrizio said. “It’s those types of things that we did primarily symbolically to show these voters that we were reaching out to them.” He added, “if our strategy is to get this group of voters based on an economic message, we don’t go off doing border events.”
An unprecedented election
Both campaigns spoke about their unique challenges. Trump’s primary campaign was “trying to devise a primary strategy while the FBI is raiding Mar-a-Lago,” Trump’s campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita said, while Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon spoke about how much work they had to do in Harris’ truncated campaign.
“We had to deliver a message, make clear her leadership, define who she is, tell her story, talk about how we understood what the American people cared about, where they were economically, and what we could do about it, and put her own stamp on her vision and leadership and at the same time we believed strategically that we had to do work to take Trump’s numbers down,” she said.
The campaign’s forward-focused message extended to its attacks on Trump. Harris campaign strategist Molly Murphy said they “didn’t see a lot of value in trying to litigate people’s memories of Trump as much as try to define the next term as not a continuation of his first term, but instead worse,” and they found Project 2025 was especially effective at doing that.
A “personalized media environment”
“The right is really good, like really brutally effective, at moving stuff from their partisan ecosystem into culture,” Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said, but Project 2025 “was one of the few times in the race when the left had that.”
Still, the Trump campaign said it found the traction Democrats gained on Project 2025 stalled after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and the focus turned to Harris.
Flaherty said today’s fractured media environment, which he called a “personalized media environment,” was a disadvantage for Democrats whose amplification ecosystem is the mainstream media and Hollywood. “They’re not actually allies and they’re not where these voters who don’t want to pay attention to politics are,” he said of traditional media. While Republicans have built up an alternative media ecosystem, “our voters, our people support institutions, they get their information and culture from institutions,” he said.
Political advertising in the streaming age
Though Harris outspent Trump, Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, said they were able to do more with less thanks to their streaming strategy. This year was the first presidential election year since cable and broadcast made up less than half of TV viewing, marking the end of an era of television politics that can be traced back Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and the first-ever TV spot ad campaign for a presidential candidate.
“There’s this growing segment of the population who do not engage with linear TV at all,” he said. “They basically get their entertainment or see whatever advertising they see from streaming.”
After the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC that Fabrizio previously worked at conducted a study of people with ad-supported streaming services and modeled it nationally, they were able to “overlay that model with our other persuadable universes so we could go one-on-one to those people.”
“I think that helped us spend, both from the campaign side and the super PAC side, our media money much more efficiently,” he said.
Pantone’s muted Mocha Mousse is its Color of the Year 2025
For the second consecutive year, Pantone went for a muted color for its annual Color of the Year.
The company describes its 2025 Color of the Year Mocha Mousse as “a warming, brown hue imbued with richness” suggestive of coffee and chocolate, and it follows the 2024 Color of the Year Peach Fuzz, marking a shift away from the bright, vibrant colors it’s named in recent years, like 2022’s Very Peri and 2023’s Viva Magenta.
“For Pantone Color of the Year 2025, we look to a mellow brown hue whose inherent richness and sensorial and comforting warmth extends further into our desire for comfort, and the indulgence of simple pleasures that we can gift and share with others,” Pantone Color Institute vice president Laurie Pressman said in a statement.
Pantone says its trend forecasting is based on analysis of film, fashion, art, design, and more, but it has its limits. Who could have known Brat Green would be the actual color of the year 2024, and even then, the color’s use cases were limited to DIY outfits for Harris campaign rallies and the Sweat Tour.
Pantone’s latest Color of the Year picks draw more from Kim Kardashian than Charli XCX, with warm skin tones that fit snugly into the Skims color palette. Indeed, the Pantone Color Institute’s executive director Leatrice Eiseman described Mocha Mousse in terms that sound fundamentally Calabasas, like “sophisticated and lush.”
“Mocha Mousse extends our perceptions of the browns from being humble and grounded to embrace aspirational and luxe,” Eiseman said.
Humble and grounded to aspirational and luxe? If quiet luxury was a color, it might be Mocha Mousse.
Have you seen this?
Trump tests ethical boundaries with branded merch (and all sales are final). Everything around President-elect Donald J. Trump has become something to monetize, including a moment of comity with Jill Biden at Notre-Dame over the weekend. [The New York Times]
This K-pop device has emerged as a powerful protest tool in South Korea. Viral videos show protesters using light sticks popular with K-pop fans. [Fast Company]
Trump’s menswear guy at the State Department. Trump named Michael Anton to serve as a director of policy planning at the State Department, and he has a long history of writing about clothes and posting on menswear forums. [Press Pass]
How Harris' campaign spent $277 million in the final weeks. The Harris campaign also continued to raise millions from small-dollar donors after losing the election, according to new campaign fundraising reports. [NBC News]
History of political design
"1778-1943 Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty" poster (1943). This poster, by the United States Office of War Information, was designed to mix “sophisticated style of contemporary graphic design with the promotion of war aims,” according to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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