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The most revealing moments of the 2016 race — as told by the campaign managers

Corey Lewandowski, former campaign manager for President-elect Donald Trump, spoke with reporters as he arrived at Trump Tower on Tuesday.Evan Vucci/Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE — Lead strategists for 14 presidential campaigns gathered at Harvard’s Kennedy School this week to formally debrief on the most unusual and unpredictable race in US history.

Now with the benefit of hindsight and post-election candor, they reflected on why so many campaigns and the media were slow to take Donald Trump seriously — and why the same people predicted incorrectly that Hillary Clinton would win.

During two days of discussions that examined the presidential primary and general election, there emerged some consensus on the 2016 campaign’s most interesting moments.

These were not necessarily the most important days of the campaign — that title is reserved for crucial primary victories or debate nights. Instead, these are four of the most revealing moments of an unprecedented race:

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July 18, 2015: Trump says US Senator John McCain is not a war hero

Trump had only been a presidential candidate for a few weeks before he spoke at an Iowa forum for social conservatives on that summer Saturday. He was not even the Republican front-runner yet, when, during a question and answer session, he said of McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

His campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski, recalled the moments that followed: As Trump walked off the stage, he said, he pulled Trump aside into a private room.

“I told him that he needed to apologize to Senator McCain,” Lewandowski told the Harvard confab.

Trump did not heed Lewandowski’s advice. Instead he held a press conference in which he doubled down on that criticism, and then pivoted to the greater issue of improving the country’s Veterans Affairs hospitals.

“When we landed back in New Jersey after the event — in Bedminster — I remember calling my wife, telling her that I would be back home soon because the campaign was probably over five weeks after it started,” Lewandowski recalled.

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Nov. 13, 2015: Terrorist attacks in Paris

For the most part, the managers of the Republican campaigns believed there wasn’t much they could do about Trump’s dominance over the primary field — except for one candidate, in one moment.

In late October, national polls showed Ben Carson surging. He was the only candidate during the entire primary to steal the national lead away from Trump. Surveys also showed Carson leading in Iowa and even in Texas.

Along with the uptick in polls came an infusion of campaign donations — as well as more scrutiny from the media.

And then violent chaos erupted in Paris.

“We felt like we were really onto something,” said Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett. “But then the Paris attacks happened, and people were looking for strength and they looked back to Trump. I feel like we were the only ones who really had a shot to beat Trump, but now the moment was gone.”

Dec. 18-19, 2015: Bernie Sanders staffers caught taking Clinton voter file data

It was a Friday in the middle of the holiday season when the Democratic National Committee announced it had learned Sanders’ campaign had accessed Clinton’s voter data through the party’s computer program. The chairman of the DNC at the time, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced the committee was immediately suspending the Sanders campaign’s access to the database.

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Then the Sanders campaign flipped the issue around, suggesting the punishment was over the top and was an example of how the primary was rigged for the Clinton campaign.

“What you did was brilliant,” said Clinton strategist Mandy Grunwald to Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver. “It was probably your best strategic day and probably among our worst because we were in debate prep.”

Indeed, the debate was the next day. And the fact that it was the only debate in New Hampshire (at the time) and it was scheduled for a Saturday night just before Christmas only fed into Sanders’ argument that the race was rigged.

Grunwald added that if Clinton’s campaign been caught doing the same, she might have had to drop out of the race. Instead, the same act only galvanized Sanders supporters.

Oct. 28, 2016: The first Comey letter to Congress

Maybe the most important day in the closing stretch was not Trump’s hot-mic comments during an Access Hollywood taping. Instead, it might have been when FBI Director James Comey notified Congress that he was investigating additional e-mails that might have been sent from Clinton’s private e-mail server.

“That letter had a huge impact in fundamentally altering the race,” said Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook.

He also acknowledged that Russian hacks into Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s e-mail had developed into a slow drip of distracting negative news.

Mook’s counterpart, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, said a lot of people missed an important point: “Voters respond to what affects them, not by what they are told is supposed to offend them.”

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James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell., or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter on politics: www.bostonglobe.com/groundgame.