Earlier than heading to an Election Evening watch celebration Tuesday, Noelle Smyth reached for a bottle of Ridge Montebello wine to rejoice with associates what she hoped can be a powerful victory for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
However when she appeared on the label, she immediately felt queasy. The classic was 2016 — the yr she donned her pantsuit and pearls and watched Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy go down in flames to Donald Trump.
Smyth put the bottle again. Nevertheless it wasn’t sufficient to push back impending doom. Carrying a Susan B. Anthony necklace from her late mom who had fought for abortion rights within the Nineteen Sixties, Smyth, 58, headed to the Democratic volunteer heart in Mountain View, then watched in bewilderment as Trump gained not solely the battleground states, however is projected to win the favored vote throughout the nation.
“This can’t be,” she stated to a buddy. “This is a bad dream.”
Volunteers and attendees hug earlier than they depart from the Democratic watch celebration within the Democratic Volunteer Heart in Mountain View, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Dai Sugano/Bay Space Information Group)
Now Harris voters — particularly California Democrats and people within the Bay Space the place Harris grew up — who’ve lengthy discovered a snug house in California’s liberal bubble at the moment are questioning whether or not they are going to be confronting an much more pervasive type of political isolation. Trump didn’t simply recapture his hard-core base. He expanded it throughout the nation.
“I’m hoping that California is big enough to hold its own, but I don’t know,” stated Laurie Stewart, 62, of San Jose, who based a neighborhood activist group that has been assembly weekly to assist Democratic campaigns. She’s heartbroken by the loss, she stated, however “I’m not surprised because that’s the dystopia we’re living in.”
Wednesday morning, Harris conceded the race, telling supporters that “while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
“It’s just befuddling to me how America can elect someone with the character of our new president-elect,” stated Zina Slaughter of Richmond, who on Sunday joined a “Win with Black Women” name, then Wednesday canceled her flight to Washington, D.C. the place she deliberate to attend the presidential inauguration. “I’m so very disappointed in America.”
Harris, 60, who was born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, spent her 107-day marketing campaign attempting to enchantment to the center class with household pleasant insurance policies and attract girls and younger voters upset with the previous president’s appointment of three Supreme Court docket justices who overturned the constitutional proper to abortion.
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After an ebullient August Democratic conference, the marketing campaign that Trump had been successful towards President Joe Biden appeared to shift in her favor. Donor cash poured in, celebrities like Taylor Swift touted endorsements, polls began shifting in her favor. Then her momentum stalled, and Democrats’ anxieties returned.
The campaigns uncovered deep divides between the candidates and polarized the nation.
“No matter who won this election, it’s clear that we’ve become two separate Americas, and neither America understands the other one or has much of an interest in understanding the other one,” stated political analyst and USC professor Dan Schnur.
“That leaves California in the exact same place that conservatives in Texas and Florida were in four years ago. You either dig in and get even angrier and fight back even harder, or you try to understand why there’s people on the other side who don’t agree with you.”
California, lengthy a conservative goal, grew to become Trump’s frequent foil and Harris the face of its troubled insurance policies on homelessness, medicine and crime and the skyrocketing worth of gasoline and housing. In Trump’s last speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, earlier than Tuesday’s election, he known as her a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco.”
In some methods, San Francisco — an epicenter of “wokeness” — has self-moderated in recent times, kicking out faculty board members throughout the COVID pandemic who spent extra time renaming politically incorrect faculties than getting children again to class, and recalling a district lawyer voters discovered too comfortable on crime. Statewide, after nationwide media for years confirmed photographs of thieves ransacking drug shops, Californians authorized a poll measure that tightened penalties on theft.
However Harris nonetheless represented the liberal beliefs she instructed voters have been ingrained in her for the reason that days her mother and father took her in a stroller to civil rights rallies at UC Berkeley within the Nineteen Sixties.
It’s that pressure between the purple and blue states, the Trump and Harris voters, that continues to divide the nation within the election’s aftermath. Smyth, who left that 2016 bottle of Ridge Montebello at house Tuesday, stated she’s not fairly certain what comes subsequent.
“I wish that I could say that I’m just going to sit on my couch and eat bonbons for the next four years, but I’m not going to give up completely,” Smyth stated. “Everybody’s just got to stay strong, mentally, physically — say a serenity prayer, pretty much right now.”
Lights are partially turned off and balloons are left on the ground after the Democratic watch celebration within the Democratic Volunteer Heart in Mountain View, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Dai Sugano/Bay Space Information Group)
Initially Printed: November 6, 2024 at 5:55 PM PST
