In Washington DC
Linda Kinstler
Barricades went up across Washington DC last weekend in preparation for the violence that many people expected to follow the presidential election. The White House and the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence, were surrounded by additional security fencing; downtown businesses boarded up their windows and police patrolled the city. By Tuesday afternoon, the perimeter of Howard University, where Kamala Harris was preparing to deliver her victory speech, was enclosed in metal fencing. Schools were closed, streets quiet. The media reported that the race was too close to call, that the vote would be uncertain and contested for days or weeks, that the armed militias who marched on the Capitol nearly four years ago might return to wreak further havoc. The momentum seemed to be with the Democrats; Harris campaign staff let it be known that they were feeling confident.
One of Harris’s slogans was ‘we will not go back’, yet the days leading up to the election felt all too familiar. A week before the vote, Harris addressed the nation from the White House Ellipse, deliberately choosing the spot from which President Trump urged his supporters to march on the Capitol. On Saturday, ten thousand people joined the Women’s March through the city, a protest which first took place the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. (The theme of this year’s march was also ‘we are not going back.’) On Tuesday evening, hawkers set up stalls selling T-shirts emblazoned with Harris’s face and the slogan ‘I’m with her,’ first used for Hillary Clinton in 2016. At the watch party on the campus lawn, where people gathered to witness Harris claim victory, I spotted several Obama-era tops and caps.
The political markers of the past two decades of Democratic campaigns had coalesced around Harris: the optimism of the first Black president, the hope for the first woman president, the failure to beat Trump in 2016 and the jubilation of Biden’s win four years later. After Biden’s late exit from the presidential race in July and Harris’s swift anointing as the nominee, she had little time to build a campaign of her own, and wasn’t able to differentiate her policies from those of the administration in which she serves. She seemed to speak for the Democratic Party rather than for herself; one of the distinctive things about her campaign was her reluctance to invoke her own life story.
By 10 p.m. on Tuesday evening, the polls had started to tilt in Trump’s favour. At Howard, where red, white and blue bunting adorned the bleachers and CNN’s election coverage was projected on giant screens, the mood was still celebratory: Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’ (Harris’s campaign song) blasted from a speaker and supporters danced beneath a banner announcing ‘Madam President’. Some people began to filter home, but only because they had been there all day and were tired. It was still early. Harris was going to pull through. Three students left waving American flags. ‘I love America!’ one girl shouted. Across the road, a Secret Service agent sat in an idling Chevy Suburban, watching the results come in on his laptop.
Women from Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, danced in their pink and green outfits and took photographs in front of the campaign bus, which was emblazoned with the words ‘A New Way Forward’. Thousands of people stood on the lawn watching the returns: each time a state was called for Harris, the crowd bellowed and waved their flags; whenever a state was called for Trump, there was silence. Harris was there and was still expected to address the crowd that evening. Yet as the night dragged on, the stage that had been set up for her in front of the university’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall remained empty.
By 11 p.m., early tallies from Georgia suggested that Trump was in the lead. The dancing stopped. People stood quietly staring at the screen, waiting for good news. The head of the Harris campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, sent a letter to her staff, which was broadcast on CNN, saying she did not expect the outcome of the election to be determined that night. ‘We will see you tomorrow,’ the letter said. People started to head home. No one wanted to say what was actually happening: instead, everyone agreed that Harris still had a path to victory, there were more votes to count, nothing was certain.
‘Why is this close?’ Ravi Perry, the head of Howard’s Department of Political Science, said to me on his way out. Worry was creeping into his voice. ‘There is so much on the line: clean water, funding for schools. Will Nato still exist? Are Black men going to survive militarised neighbourhoods?’ As we spoke, a friend interrupted to tell him he had won his own race to join the local neighborhood commission; Perry half-heartedly waved an American flag over his head.
Around 11.30 p.m., North Carolina was called for Trump. A graduate student told me she was going home to make a large margarita. Around 1 a.m., just as it became clear that the Republicans had secured the Senate, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of the Harris campaign, came out to tell those of us who were still there that Harris would not be addressing us this evening. ‘We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted,’ he said. ‘You will hear from her tomorrow.’ Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, had made a similar statement at a similarly ungodly hour in 2016. Richmond adopted a tone of strained positivity, yet his mere appearance was enough to confirm that a concession wasn’t far away. An hour later, Pennsylvania was called for Trump.
The next morning, the city was silent. DC is openly hostile to Trump: more than 90 per cent of voters backed Harris. Howard was empty, save for a handful of tired campaign workers. I watched as they dragged tables and chairs outside and pulled metal barriers out of a rental van. There were two students walking by the barricades. ‘All right, so what country are we moving to?’ one asked. ‘What the fuck, Georgia?’
The Harris campaign announced that the vice president would address the nation at 4 p.m. on Wednesday. By the early afternoon, people had begun to file back into the yard, many of them wearing Harris-Walz attire and carrying the American flags they had been given the previous night. Some were in genuine distress, saddened but not shocked by the results. Others appeared unmoved: a man posed for a photograph and told his friend he could share it ‘as long as I look a little bit sad about democracy.’ The crowd was much smaller than the previous evening, the far bleachers nearly empty.
‘A lot of us are just speechless. We thought the race was going to be close,’ Ryan Turner, a non-profit executive from Baltimore, told me. A Howard freshman said he’d been harassed by Trump voters on his way to the polling station, where he was voting for the first time. ‘I didn’t care. I went in there. I was gonna vote. Ancestors have died for us to be able to vote.’
A group of freshman girls told me that the results made them feel unsafe. A campaign volunteer told me he was there awaiting further instructions. No one seemed to know what to expect. It felt worse than 2016, Rebecca ’Toyin Doherty, a Howard alumna, told me. She hoped that Trump would not ‘do all the things he says he is going to do’. His campaign promises include ‘mass deportations on day one’ and ‘we’re going to drill, baby, drill’. He has expressed support for abortion restrictions, yet in four of the states he carried – Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Nevada – new abortion protections won at the ballot box. Trump’s victory means that the investigations into the events of 6 January 2021 will wind down and that he is unlikely to be further prosecuted for any of his federal crimes.
Harris finally emerged at 4.30 p.m., striding out smiling to Beyoncé: ‘Freedom, freedom, where are you?’ She told the doleful crowd that they must accept the results and that she had called Trump to congratulate him on his victory. The crowd booed. She said that the administration would help him and his team with the transition: ‘We will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.’ The crowd cheered. She swore her allegiance to the constitution, to conscience and to God, and told the young people in the audience that it was ‘going to be OK’. She concluded by telling her supporters about a ‘law of history, true of every society’: ‘Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.’ (The phrase is often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.)
But there are no ‘laws’ of history and platitudes are not going to reassure anyone worried about the next four years. A retired alumna of Harris’s sorority told me that the vote was a ‘statement about America’. ‘When I came in, someone gave me an American flag and I took it,’ she said. ‘And then I felt so stupid for taking the flag, so I put it down.’
Comments
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8 November 2024
at
5:35pm
Ted Eames
says:
Whither now the Democrats? They are now at a much lower ebb than after Trump's win in 2016.
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10 November 2024
at
3:53pm
Montgomery Taylor-wallace
says:
@
Ted Eames
White straight men, maybe you want to take some of the blame for change. I hold you responsible for this clusterfuck and to make it worse you blame identity politics. Grow up!
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10 November 2024
at
4:38pm
su fernandez
says:
@
Montgomery Taylor-wallace
????????
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9 November 2024
at
8:46pm
Doc TH
says:
There was a gross misreading of the sentiments of much of the populace. Despite many Harris' supporters opinions, the results were not a result of racism or misogyny. In 2020, Biden promised to be a centrist; he was not. He also promised to be a "bridge" to other Democrat candidates; yet he insisted on running in the face of alarming physical decline. There was no open selection of an alternative candidate. The cost of living is high; immigration is uncontrolled; the majority of the public is unsympathetic to gender fluidity; DEI excesses are unpopular; the majority do not believe in paying for the "forgiveness" of others' student loans; etc.
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9 November 2024
at
11:09pm
su fernandez
says:
@
Doc TH
I agree with you, wholeheartedly. I suspect the Dems will have to rely on Republican overreach to win some of the working-class defectors in 2026. I do not see a Dem producing a "Sister Souljah" or "Jeremiah Wright" moment now, separating himself from an extreme position, as Clinton and Obama did. The "extreme" position then was about race and it didn't come from inside the party. Today, there are multiple "extreme" positions from which a Dem candidate might need to distance himself or herself: trans, DEI, immigration, climate change--and advocates for these positions are now in government, in academia, in non-profits, in media. The progressive agenda is institutionalized.
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9 November 2024
at
9:48pm
Nic
says:
For Republicans, it's far easier to create a coalition between factions: no enemies to the right, and anyone with an whiff of old GOP conservatism is easily discarded as an unbeliever. Nuance is for Democrats, they seem to say, as giving offense is a form of policy: owning the libs is more literal now that every branch of government is stacked against progress.
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11 November 2024
at
7:05pm
marek bozalek
says:
From afar I hardly discern the difference between Republicans/ Democrats and Conservatives/ Labourites. The Labour party and Democrats have whored themselves to corporations and lobbyists for money and disdained and lied to their historic bases.
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11 November 2024
at
7:12pm
marek bozalek
says:
@
marek bozalek
Apologies..
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13 November 2024
at
12:59pm
Delaide
says:
First, according to published data (Federal Reserve), in Biden’s term average wages rose more than the cost of living. The US economy also outperformed most of the world. Economically he was a successful President. Most of the people who said they were doing it tough (actually other people, they were ok themselves) were Republicans,. The fact is that Americans voted in a President who continuously lies, going right back to birtherism, inauguration crowd sizes, how he had a better plan to replace Obamacare, election fraud and how he will end the Russian war in 1 day etc etc. So I don’t think there is much to be gained by speculating on whether Biden should have resigned earlier or whether Harris was the right pick etc etc. A house brick would make a better President than Trump. We can only hope that the inevitable stuff-ups that accompany Trump’s presidency will turn this brilliant but overly conservative and religious country around.
Read moreThey have contributed to his disastrous return by making a series of gross miscalculations: they wrongly thought that Trump's courtroom problems would hobble him; they stuck with Biden long after it became painfully clear that he was not up to a second term; they assumed that the female vote would be energised by the abortion rights issue (Biden polled better amongst women in 2020 than Harris did in 2024).
Wither now the Democrats?
The Democrats clearly did not understand the attitudes of what used to be their reliable political constituency - not elite progressives, but the working class.
For the Left, there is too great a spectrum, which allows a thousand real and invented wedge issues to foster disunion. If it wasn't Palestine, it was the furor of TERFs, or the received information of generational clashes, the disaster of Neoliberalism against us all.
2016 was hard in its own way, but this pulls the veil away for anyone who felt that compassion and softness was possible. For those of us who knew it would happen, it still hurts, because at heart, the Left wants to believe the future will be better, while the Right believes all that is good is past: all the better to get yours, while the getting's good, and in any case, at least the oligarchy got what they paid for.
The Democrats will probably only win when they act as egregiously as the Conservatives.
Long may they both lose.
When the Republicans act as egregiously as the Conservatives.