Many in Philadelphia were stunned to wake up Wednesday morning and find the election called for Donald J. Trump. But not Maggie Moran.
A Trump volunteer, Moran had stayed up late to watch the results come in at the Trump campaign office on South Street.
"I didn't know about it coming down to Pennsylvania, but I always knew he was going to win. I knew that in my heart," said Moran, an Army wife who supports Trump's anti-abortion stance and his promise to give veterans "the love and support they need."
Prior to election day, she hadn't told many people about her support for Trump.
But at the campaign office, "We had a lot of fun staying up and having people knock on our window and wave and get excited," she said, adding that the group was diverse. "We had immigrants, we had black, we had Latino there, we had women, we had men, we had the whole run of the bunch."
She said she wished some Clinton supporters "were taking it better."
"I wasn't happy about Obama, but I didn't name call," she said. "I'm not asking anybody to be happy. Mourn, but don't name call and be hateful."
For fellow Trump supporter Wendy Neininger, the surprising nature of Trump's victory could be chalked up to only one thing: an enthusiasm gap.
"I kept telling people to not listen to the polls, to stay focused, to go out and do what you need to do to support the campaign," said Neininger, 67, a Newtown Square resident and a grassroots volunteer for the Trump campaign.
"They absolutely underestimated us," said Neininger, a retired communications manager with multiple degrees who has backed Trump since the day he announced. "I made a number of phone calls to people who had not voted in 20 years, 30 years, and they said they were voting for Donald Trump."
From the start of his campaign, Trump often touted that the "silent majority" — the forgotten citizens, the downtrodden ones, the "Joe the Plumbers" — would be back for this election and turn out in droves to support him.
"I wasn't shocked," Neininger said, when it was declared Trump had won. "I was overjoyed."
Missteps along the way — including Trump's remarks about women and minority groups — were not enough from deter his voters from turning out for the issues they cared about most, Neininger said, citing unemployment, rising healthcare costs, and "people feeling they were not safe in their own country."
"We find those comments offensive," Neininger said of Trump's remarks regarding women. "We are strong, we work hard, we are educated. But that's not a substantive issue when you're trying to figure out how to pay your bills, how to feed your kids, how to pay down a $20 trillion debt. How you put people to work, how you secure the border — those are the issues we care about."
Another Philadelphia-based Trump had one word to describe his excitement for the newly-elected president.
"Huge," said Philadelphia GOP chairman Joe DeFelice, borrowing one of his candidate's oft-used words. "We're really excited."
DeFelice said that the local GOP, with usually no hope of winning heavily-blue Philadelphia, typically tries to shift the voting margins — and focused this year on attracting blue-collar voters, including Democrats, instead of "Center City-type Republicans, Chestnut Hill-type Republicans."
He said he and other local GOP officials were still monitoring internal polling in the party's Philadelphia offices at 2:54 in the morning, calling the City Commissioners as the scales tipped inexorably in Donald Trump's favor.
"I told the room, we don't want anyone cheering yet — it's a little premature — but we're going to get those electoral votes," he recalled telling the GOP operatives packing the office. "The place went off anyway."
While DeFelice didn't publicly endorse a candidate during the primaries, he had originally supported Chris Christie. "But a part of me was always rooting for Trump," he said. "I was really a 'whoever wins the primary' person."
"He had baggage, and he has baggage, and we have to work with that," he added. "Thankfully, we were going against a candidate with much more baggage than him."
He said he saw the stunning upset as an opportunity to recruit Philadelphia voters to an "urban Republican brand," which is typically at odds during presidential elections. But he said he believed Trump fit that bill surprisingly well.
"He's from New York City, he knows Philly," he said, noting that Trump spent a lot of time in the area during the primaries. "He's done more than any Republican candidate in recent memory has done in the city of Philadelphia."
Sam Katz, three-time mayoral candidate and a registered Republican who voted for Clinton, said more than anything he was struck by the "tremendous black eye" lobbed at the polling industry.
"The Trump campaign understood something that was going on," he said. "They must have done a tremendous amount of high-quality research to not only tap into, but to adjust their poll samples, and so everything they said they thought was going to happen, which dictated his presence in the last two weeks and was laughed at by the professionals, turns out to be absolutely accurate."
Katz said he thinks it was a failure of polling, not a widespread "hidden vote" that led to the stunning Trump win Wednesday morning.
For Katz, the results were personally troubling. "I thought back to all of the messages and abuse that Donald heaped on large segments of the American public – I thought about his own persona and just wondered, is that us? Is that really us?"
For Philadelphia, Katz predicts the line the mayor has enjoyed for eight years to the White House will be cut off if not severely hindered. That will leave Kenney looking for alternative alliances.
"I think Jim Kenney would be very wise to try to build some alliances with Pat Toomey."
And what could it mean for the Republican Party here? Not much, Katz said, considering Philadelphia turned out in droves for Clinton.