As Election Day gave way to Wednesday, Democrats were reckoning with the reality that the party was in for a repeat of 2016. Donald Trump was outperforming his 2020 margins across the map and had won key battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was struggling to match Joe Biden’s margins across broad swaths of the country, from light-blue counties that swung towards Democrats in 2020 to deep red ones where Trump has continued to grow his leads.
With each successive swing state that fell to the former president, Democrats’ ever-present anxiety gave way to shock, despair and, finally, acceptance: Harris was going to lose.
“Really never fully took in that this could happen again,” said one former Democratic Party official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is beyond any words I can use to describe.”
The warning signs for Harris began cropping up even before the results from most states started rolling in. Exit polls showed Trump making inroads with Black men in North Carolina and in Georgia, which the Republican wrested back from Democrats not long into election night. Harris also underperformed nationally with Hispanic voters and young voters compared to Biden in 2020, exit polls found. Those surveys even showed so-called double-haters — voters who held unfavorable opinions of both candidates — breaking for Trump.
Then Trump started running up the score across the map. With more than 2,500 counties reporting at least 95% of the vote, Trump has outperformed his 2020 margins in roughly 92 percent of them, according to a POLITICO analysis of preliminary results from the Associated Press. And Trump made gains even in deep-blue areas like his former home of New York City. Harris, meanwhile, was lagging Biden in key counties he won four years ago — including Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, which includes the president’s native Scranton.
“He expanded his base a little and they came out,” said Neil Oxman, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist. And that, combined with Harris underperforming Biden, “is the difference in switching a state.”
With each minute that Harris’ potential paths to the White House narrowed, the mood within her campaign and among Democrats more broadly grew grimmer.
In an attempt to assuage anxieties, Harris’ campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, circulated a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to staffers late Tuesday night that said: “We have known all along that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies through the Blue Wall states. And we feel good about what we’re seeing.”
Barely two hours later, Harris no-showed her own party at her alma mater of Howard University, where the mood was already souring. A clip of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which the vice president had used as her walk-out song at campaign events, was greeted with groans. Attempts to start “Kamala” chants fell flat.
As former Rep. Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Harris’ campaign, came onstage to disband what Democrats had hoped would be a victory celebration, some members of her campaign were still holding out hope that ballots yet to be counted would break her way. But others had begun bracing for defeat.
“We still have votes to count, we still have states that have not been called yet,” Richmond said. “We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken.”
But “you won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” he told the dejected crowd. “You will hear from her tomorrow.”
Beyond Washington, Democrats were rapidly losing faith that Harris could keep the party’s bulwark intact.
It “feels more like 2016 than 2020,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.
“That’s what’s troubling,” he added. “Those of us that had hoped for a resounding repatriation of Trump, we’re left to hope for a nail biter through the Blue Wall.”
And some Democrats’ calls to not despair — “everybody fucking relax,” said Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, “there’s still a ton of votes to get through” — were falling on increasingly deaf ears. In a callback to the beginning of Harris’ campaign, one Democratic operative wondered: “Is it brat to lose an election?”
