Democrats live their nightmare. Once more.
As Election Day gave strategy to Wednesday, Democrats have been reckoning with the fact that the occasion was in for a repeat of 2016. Donald Trump was outperforming his 2020 margins throughout the map and had gained key battleground states, together with Pennsylvania and Georgia. Kamala Harris, in the meantime, was struggling to match Joe Biden’s margins throughout broad swaths of the nation, from light-blue counties that swung in direction of Democrats in 2020 to deep pink ones the place Trump has continued to develop his leads.
With every successive swing state that fell to the previous president, Democrats’ ever-present nervousness gave strategy to shock, despair and, lastly, acceptance: Harris was going to lose.
“Actually by no means totally took in that this might occur once more,” mentioned one former Democratic Social gathering official, granted anonymity to talk candidly. “It’s past any phrases I can use to explain.”
The warning indicators for Harris started cropping up even earlier than the outcomes from most states began rolling in. Exit polls confirmed Trump making inroads with Black males in North Carolina and in Georgia, which the Republican wrested again from Democrats not lengthy into election evening. Harris additionally underperformed nationally with Hispanic voters and younger voters in comparison with Biden in 2020, exit polls found. These surveys even confirmed so-called double-haters — voters who held unfavorable opinions of each candidates — breaking for Trump.
Then Trump began working up the rating throughout the map. With greater than 2,500 counties reporting at the least 95% of the vote, Trump has outperformed his 2020 margins in roughly 92 p.c of them, in keeping with a POLITICO evaluation of preliminary outcomes from the Related Press. And Trump made positive factors even in deep-blue areas like his former residence of New York Metropolis. Harris, in the meantime, was lagging Biden in key counties he gained 4 years in the past — together with Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, which incorporates the president’s native Scranton.
“He expanded his base somewhat they usually got here out,” mentioned Neil Oxman, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist. And that, mixed with Harris underperforming Biden, “is the distinction in switching a state.”
With every minute that Harris’ potential paths to the White Home narrowed, the temper inside her marketing campaign and amongst Democrats extra broadly grew grimmer.
In an try to assuage anxieties, Harris’ marketing campaign supervisor, Jen O’Malley Dillon, circulated a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to staffers late Tuesday evening that mentioned: “We have now recognized all alongside that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies by way of the Blue Wall states. And we be ok with what we’re seeing.”
Barely two hours later, Harris no-showed her personal occasion at her alma mater of Howard College, the place the temper was already souring. A clip of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which the vp had used as her walk-out track at marketing campaign occasions, was greeted with groans. Makes an attempt to begin “Kamala” chants fell flat.
As former Rep. Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Harris’ marketing campaign, got here onstage to disband what Democrats had hoped can be a victory celebration, some members of her marketing campaign have been nonetheless holding out hope that ballots but to be counted would break her manner. However others had begun bracing for defeat.
“We nonetheless have votes to rely, we nonetheless have states that haven’t been referred to as but,” Richmond mentioned. “We are going to proceed in a single day to combat to guarantee that each vote is counted, that each voice has spoken.”
However “you gained’t hear from the vp tonight,” he informed the dejected crowd. “You’ll hear from her tomorrow.”
Past Washington, Democrats have been quickly dropping religion that Harris might preserve the occasion’s bulwark intact.
It “feels extra like 2016 than 2020,” mentioned Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.
“That’s what’s troubling,” he added. “These of us that had hoped for a powerful repatriation of Trump, we’re left to hope for a nail biter by way of the Blue Wall.”
And a few Democrats’ calls to not despair — “everyone fucking chill out,” mentioned Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, “there’s nonetheless a ton of votes to get by way of” — have been falling on more and more deaf ears. In a callback to the start of Harris’ marketing campaign, one Democratic operative puzzled: “Is it brat to lose an election?”
By the point the Related Press referred to as Pennsylvania for Trump, Democrats have been grappling with what went incorrect for Harris. And a few strategists have been shortly deciding on the argument that between voters’ damaging views of the route of the nation and the financial system below the Biden administration — and Trump’s enduring magnetism, regardless of his felony convictions and different controversies — have been merely insurmountable for Harris.
“She did a very good job. However I feel, on reflection, this race was unwinnable,” mentioned Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “Trump, rightly or wrongly, his persona and his basic assault line in opposition to the situation of the nation, the Biden-Harris administration and albeit the Democratic Social gathering, was in the long run unbeatable.”
As daybreak approached, the recriminations have been starting. Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist who beforehand suggested Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), mentioned Harris was handed the reins “too late” in a “powerful setting.” Jeff Weaver, one other Sanders alum, mentioned the Democratic Social gathering has to “reestablish its relationship with the working-class folks.”
John Morgan, a significant Biden bundler who for months criticized Harris’ place on the prime of the ticket and pledged to not financially assist her, simply felt aid.
“Reduction that I am not loopy, that I wasn’t loopy. That I noticed the trains coming and screamed get the f— out of the best way,” he mentioned. “Just like the coyote and the highway runner they only stepped proper in entrance of the practice. … Street Rrunner is Donald Trump, beep beep, and that’s the top of the film.”
Jessica Piper, Holly Otterbein, Adam Wren, Mia McCarthy and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
