Election 2024 Live Updates: Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump ...
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Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty
This evening has contained an era, in political time. At sunset on the East Coast, most of the models gave Kamala Harris a good chance to become the first woman President of the United States. By the time polls closed out West, just a few hours later, she looked like she might be lucky to win any swing state at all. There are still votes left to count, but virtually every corner of the country, and nearly every demographic group, has swung toward Trump—in some cases by a little, and in some cases by a lot. Rural voters across the Southeast. Hispanics in Florida. Black men. The Driftless region of Wisconsin. Even—astonishingly, but, in a certain light, inevitably—the outer boroughs of New York City.
For the Democrats, the recriminations and regrets may already be beginning—in many directions, but especially against Joe Biden, whose decision to stay in the race until he was forced out may have made this election effectively unwinnable for his party. But what Democrats think happened in this election probably matters less than what Republicans think, since—with the caveat that the race for control of the House still looks very tight—it is the G.O.P. that is on track to govern. Trump did not run a moderate campaign but an extreme one, punctuated by his demonization of Haitian migrants in Springfield, his continued insistence that he won the 2020 election, and his promise to target his political opponents. And yet, he is on track to win a decisive majority, with a more diverse coalition than he has had before. We can look forward to the next four years with a lot of worry. If, as now looks likely, Trump wins the Presidency, his party will be unified behind him, and the guardrails will be off.
What a night in America. A long, long night.
Trump leaves the stage to Y.M.C.A., putting a bow on a pretty happy-go-lucky speech that also included references to how some of his supporters think God spared him from an assassin’s bullet to save the country. So . . . a real mix of things. He is the presumptive President-elect at this point. Quite a familiar spectacle at this point, but a spectacle nonetheless.
And Clare, to your point—whatever role Musk wants to play in the years to come, we’ve never had an oligarchic arrangement like this. Not only his wealth but also a social-media machine at his disposal, and now, it seems, a direct line to the world’s most powerful military. The mind reels.
Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP
Ha—yeah, Clare, “happy Trump” but also . . . Trump the team player? This speech seems a lot more in the first person plural than the 2016 version. He’s talking about the “movement,” passing the mike off to Vance and LaCivita. And in a sense he’s not wrong—the Republican Party and conservative movement really are much more united behind him than they have been before.
“A star is born—Elon!” Trump says of Elon Musk. This is vintage happy Trump, calling people to the podium, shouting people out. We, of course, have to note how unusual it is that the richest man in the world seems to have made his way to the inner circle of the probable President-elect, having helped run some of his outsourced ground game, and, of course, Musk is a guy with some crucial government contracts.
Trump, king of camp, is now rhapsodizing about Elon Musk’s rocket.
Trump shouts out J. D. Vance, the truly repellent next Vice-President of the United States, calling him a “feisty guy.” If by feisty, he means vibrating with resentment and malice, he might be on to something.
“This will truly be the golden age of America,” Trump says, and projects that he will win at least three hundred and fifteen electoral votes. Notes his popular-vote victory, which is genuinely notable, assuming it holds. A Republican hasn’t won it since 2004.
Donald Trump has won Pennsylvania, with its nineteen electoral votes bringing his total in the Electoral College to two hundred and sixty-seven. Kamala Harris currently has two hundred and fourteen electoral votes, with two hundred and seventy needed to win the Presidency.
Well, the whole Trump brigade—huge cast of characters—has taken the stage to the strains of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a tune that surprisingly has lasted since the second Bush era.
But speaking of Trump’s appeal, it seems almost certain that we’ll be thrust into a reprisal of the political debates of 2016 and ’17. Is “economic anxiety” a licit explanation for his success, or should we treat his voters—half the country—as unrepentant bigots? I think the latter will be harder to argue given his newly diverse coalition, but, if Twitter is any indication—the recriminations have already begun—some commentators will be trying to put that notion forward just as forcefully this go ’round.
Eric Trump just posted a tweet whose entire substance is a picture of his father. Trump, now very likely to be sworn in as the forty-seventh President, stands near a smudgy full-length mirror, looking down at a piece of paper. It must be his speech. In the mirror, you can see his daughter Ivanka, taking the picture. Trump’s skin looks waxen, his demeanor a pantomime of serious thought. Maybe he’s finally about to give his surely repulsive speech. To your point about his perverse political appeal, Ben, whatever he says will likely appeal to more people than I care to imagine.
Not to be snippy, but I really wonder whether any of these Biden diehards might feel a prick of conscience about trying to sneak a clearly unfit candidate past the electorate, drastically undermining the Party’s ability to move on and do its job at such a perilous time. It now seems like the Democrats walked around under the sway of a huge delusion whose outline looks a lot like Joe Biden. For months on end, an accomplished Administration had nobody to carry its message, or to defend it against a whirlwind of falsehoods. Unforgivable.
One thing we can say for sure: the Democratic party will not be the same a year from now. For a magazine piece recently, I asked Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, what would happen if Harris lost. He said, “I think the Democratic Party would have an internal reckoning of a kind that we haven’t had in my memory.”
I’d be guessing at this point. They aren’t in a voluble mood right now.
Evan, not to put you on the spot, but do you have any spidey sense of how Biden diehards might approach this week, which is sure to be filled with finger-pointing and reprisals?
Right, Vinson, even tonight, as numbers started to tumble for Harris, influential Democrats, including some of the donors who financed the ground game, took solace in the sense that manifestations of Democratic energy and organization were everywhere. (In Wisconsin, the Party had a policy it called “No Yard Left Unsigned.”) The Republicans, meanwhile, were hardly visible in the door-knocking game. And, evidently, that did not matter. So what did matter?
One thing I’m thinking about—as I stumble about in a daze, waiting wincingly for this speech—is whether this election foretells a radical shift in campaign tactics, away from the “ground” and even more ardently toward the Internet and whatever it is we mean when we say “television” now. In other words: those shattered media already doing their best to break the nation down into an ever more incomprehensible set of market-determined groups and subgroups. By most accounts, Trump’s ground game—powered by the witless Musk—was a bit of a mess, but Harris’s professional field operation seems to have been helpless to stem the tide of Trump’s support. Are podcasts and social feeds and Twitch broadcasts the political battlegrounds of the next few decades? If so, it might spell a big change in how campaigns harvest and allocate campaign cash and volunteer resources.
According to CNN and MSNBC, Trump is going to speak soon.
