In Washington DC

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.’