Maga redux. As midnight arrived in Washington DC, the Kamala Harris crowd in the yard of Howard University stood around and tried to maintain the mood of a party that never fully began, even as it began to dawn on everyone that Donald Trump is on the cusp of returning to the city, with the winter winds of January, as the 47th president of the United States.
It was around then, clocks striking 12, down at the Trump party in Mar-a-Lago, that the crowd erupted when North Carolina was called, by the liberal-leaning CNN broadcaster, for the Republicans.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was also beginning to close in on Pennsylvania, the state whose 19 electoral college votes has rendered it the key state of the past three elections. Without it, Harris can have no path to the White House.
Long before any concession speeches were drafted, it felt as though the aftermath had begun. A golden night was beginning to materialise for the Republicans: a second Trump presidency, an increased margin in the House and majority control of the Senate.
It is too early to declare anything for certain but the Harris was trailing Trump by some 178,000 votes in Pennsylvania with 77 per cent of the votes returned and would require an overwhelming bump from Philadelphia and its suburbs to recover that margin. It was, for Donald Trump, reportedly heading from his Mar-a-Lago residence to the results watch party in West Palm Beach, arguably the least turbulent night of an election year that has thrown everything at him.
All afternoon in downtown Washington, the atmosphere had been different: very still and balmy, with joggers and empty streets and the streets around Howard fenced off and heavily policed from midday. Choosing Howard, the traditionally black university founded in 1867, was for Harris a symbolic choice.
She matriculated in 1982, in economics and political science, and has always regarded it as a home from home and has emerged as one of its most celebrated graduates along with Toni Morrison and Thurgood Marshall. She chose Howard to launch her ill-fated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and now found herself preparing to return to the yard for the defining night of her political life.
And as the crowd began to gather, the symbolic resonance of Howard must, for many, have begun to chime with many supporters with the radical element to Kamala Harris’s bid for presidency. The chief themes of this election have been the economy, abortion rights and the southern border. And if Donald Trump is sworn in for a second term, the failure of the Biden administration to arrest the staggering cost-of-living crisis that has gripped the country over the past four years will be identified as the main reason for his success.
But the sub-themes of this election are race and gender. America has never elected a woman to the White House and is on the verge of declining to once again. And Harris was trying to win a presidency despite the fact that no black woman has ever served as governor in any state and that she herself welcomed just the third black woman to the Senate last year. In terms of skin colour, Barack Obama remains the striking aberration in the long cast of white men dating back to 1789.
At least an exhausted country will have an answer soon. From seven o’clock, after the polls closed, Americans settled in front of the televisions to watch the results trickle in, as obscure counties in Georgia, in Iowa, in Nevada, flashed up on the screens. Election nights are a peculiar time capsule: a brief return to the analogue age when everyone is watching the same television show at the same time.
By 10.15pm, Trump led the electoral college vote by 172 to 81 and down in Mar-a-Lago, where a biblical rain was falling, Donald Trump’s peculiar coalition of stars, from RFK jnr to Elon Musk to Nigel Farage, watched with keen interest as the Republican returns in Virginia threatened the first shock of the night.
With 71 per cent of the votes counted, Trump held a 1 per cent lead. Virginia was a state that Joe Biden carried by 10 per cent four years ago. In the weeks of intense forecasts and speculation, Old Virginny was hardly mentioned.
But the Trump show had visited Salem in Virginia as recently as Saturday, a decision that perplexed observers then. Many of the federal DC professionals whose futures Trump has promised to uproot live in the northern reaches of Virginia. Robert F Kennedy’s family home was Hickory Hill, in McLean, Virginia. Now his son and namesake was down in rainy Florida, wedded to a historic Republican night. Harris would recover but it presaged the national mood: Trump had erased the narrow margins that propelled Biden to victory four years ago.
Sunday’s Iowa poll, meanwhile, which suggested a Democratic revolution, led by women voters, in what had been a steadfast Trump citadel, began to wither as night deepened and the results came in from the 99 counties: still predominantly red, still Trump.
Any by 11pm, the national map was beginning began to reflect the state of play eight years ago, when Trump shocked Hillary Clinton. With 67 per cent of the voting counted, he led Pennsylvania by 116,000 votes (50.7 per cent to Harris’s 48.2 per cent) and he also held a narrow lead in Wisconsin, two of the three Blue Wall states critical to Harris’s path to the presidency.
In Howard University, the music stopped and the voice of John King, CNN’s uncanny map-master, was shown on the big screens. And the faces in the crowd were solemn. And the voices were hushed now. And as King’s voice carried into the night, his mellow voice, to Harris supporters, carried the grave but kindly air of a doctor delivering bad news in an upbeat fashion. “There’s still time,” he repeated.
Harris was losing ground, a few thousand votes here, and there, in too many counties. And it was too early for questions but more than a few minds must have wondered if she shouldn’t have just chosen Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, to improve her chances of sealing the state that she absolutely has to win.
And a memo was dispatched by the Harris campaign to tell staff to knuckle down: that the election would grind down into the nauseatingly close and tough race that had been predicted for weeks. And that nothing would be decided on Tuesday night. It was uncertain whether Harris would even make the short trip across the city to address the crowd.
Down in Florida, the watch party mood was more trenchantly upbeat. But really, as the results came in, it was a case of ever-decreasing circles and the identity of the future president of the United States coming down to those precious few votes that had, just hours earlier, passed through the hands of anonymous voters in the struggling, valiant former industrial towns of Pennsylvania and the remote farmlands of Wisconsin.
By 11.30pm, the Republican campaign was doing what it needed to in the battleground states of the south, holding North Carolina and flipping Georgia, which Joe Biden had won by 11,000 votes four years ago. And with 76 per cent of the votes counted now in Pennsylvania – in Joe Biden’s childhood state – Trump had 165,000 more in his corner, with the Democratic campaign waiting on a bank of votes to be announced from the Philadelphia regions around midnight.
None of this was doing anything to ease the frayed nerves of the electorate but Republican voters were in a happier state of mind as the clock turned to midnight. The possibility of a resounding Trump blowout: of taking all three Rust Belt states was still alive.
As the date turned to Wednesday, November 6th, in America, there was time to consider the dauntless resilience and doggedness of Trump. He stands now on the threshold of becoming the first convicted felon to be elected president of the United States. He has run a general election campaign while dealing with multiple, multimillion-dollar court cases, which he has always insisted were manufactured and manipulated by deep state forces.
He has – miraculously – survived an assassination attempt in a Pennsylvania field (he’s entitled to say the state owes him one) and was bundled off his own golf course when a man with a rifle was found lurking in the bushes. He has, through the long torrid summer, delivered a relentlessly dark and poisonous portrait of the many millions of undocumented migrants who poured over the border during the Biden-Harris years – as murderers, as rapists, as mentally ill.
He managed to subvert Harris’s life-story snippet of working in McDonald’s by donning an apron and dishing out fries: Donald McDonald. The stunt may have looked gauche to many, but it was clever and it worked.
Trump critics argued that he had lost the freshness and element of shock he had enjoyed in 2016 as a renegade outsider: the gold-tinted billionaire here to rescue the working man from an America hijacked by the liberal elite. This time, his act seemed dated and he himself looked old when pitted against Kamala Harris rather than Joe Biden.
But he remains the grievance candidate, and he remains the person promising an entire swathe of American society that he can divert their land from becoming a place that they no longer recognise. All the opinion columns and all the yodels of ‘joy’ in the world could not change the fact that tens of millions still see the 78-year-old Donald Trump as their last best chance.
If Trump closes in on this win, his second administration promises to tilt America in a radically conservative new direction. He has promised that the deportations of undocumented immigrants will begin on ‘day one’. It remains to be seen whether Harris’s warning of a national abortion ban will come to pass, and what influence the architects of the controversial Project 2025 blueprint might play on decision making. A second term would all but confirm the GOP as a Maga-Republican Party now.
That ‘if’ remains alive. Somewhat fittingly, an elemental battle that many Americans believe to be about the nature of American democracy is boiling down to Philadelphia, the First City. But much like the crowd drifting into the quiet streets of Washington, the hopes of the Democrats and Kamala Harris seemed to be slowly and inevitably petering out.
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