CAMPAIGN DIARY
The keen ones began lining up at about midday to get into the party they thought was happening the night before.
They were all keen in a sense, these supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had queued for hours on Tuesday to get a glimpse of her, only to be told just before 1am that she wasn’t coming. Less than 12 hours later, that same crowd, presumably exhausted, assembled in the same place, Howard University in Washington DC, for a speech none wanted to hear.
Supporters stood in relative silence and hugged one another for a couple of hours on the lawn. The teleprompter glass was cleaned with windolene (last night a poor woman had to windolene Harris’ bulletproof barrier too). This will be one of Harris’ most significant political acts. You don’t want a smudged teleprompter.
The crowd broke into applause at the appearance of running mate Governor Tim Walz shortly after 4pm, Harris’ scheduled speaking time. Harris appeared about 20 minutes later - practically on time by the standards of American politics. Now consigned to the losing side of history, she doesn’t have the luxury of making people wait.
Harris entered this race with a reputation as a terrible speaker and interviewee. She remains a terrible interviewee (her catastrophic sit-down with Fox News’ Bret Baier was one of the lowest points of her campaign), but she has become a strong speaker.
Conceding the race, Harris needed to impart courage to her supporters to carry the torch for the values of her campaign and to fight the new Trump administration when it trampled on them - but she also needed to make a virtue of giving up the vice-presidency and peacefully transferring that power to that same administration. Paradoxically, one of the greatest legacies she and her campaign can leave, is peacefully handing power to the administration she is urging supporters to resist.
We’ll see the strongest example of this on January 6 next year, when Harris, in her role as Speaker of the Senate, certifies the results of the election, carrying out a vital function then President Donald Trump urged his own Vice-President Mike Pence not to do in 2021.
To a peal of applause, Harris said she had called Trump and said she would “engage in a peaceful transfer of power”.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said.
It speaks volumes about the parlous state of American politics that the “peaceful transfer of power” is now an applause line.
The crowd was restless and, dare I say it, slightly bitter that Harris chose not to appear on election night, following such a long wait. Fortunately, her concession sufficiently delivered on Obama-like rhetoric - and comfort - to make up for any disappointment.
“There’s an adage a historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages,” Harris said.
“The adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars”.
Staff looked exhausted and confused. This country has learned a lot about polling since 2016 and many parts of this week’s result were fairly well foreshadowed in polling data, yet Democrat staff and supporters, while knowing a loss was fairly likely, nevertheless seem confounded by its scale.
The Democrats need to work out what went wrong and how to fix it. This is challenging given the sheer breadth of the defeat: they lost the Senate; they are not likely to win the House; they failed to hold together their diverse multi-ethnic coalition of voters, many of whom veered towards Trump, despite his history of racist rhetoric; they are likely to lose every swing state, and Harris under-performed Biden just about everywhere.
Perhaps most importantly, the Democrats are on track to lose the popular vote for only the second time since 1988. The electoral map in the USA has meant Republicans can try to win the presidency without winning the popular vote, but Democrats’ path to victory tends to rely on swinging the popular vote by so much that it results in wins in key swing states. That’s bad news not just for this election, but for future elections, if nothing is done to fix it.
A loss of that magnitude, across key demographics and key states, would suggest the Democrats are in for a period of recrimination and soul searching, the bitter battle between the centrists and leftists, personified by the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016 or the scrap in the House between “The Squad” and Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this decade, might reemerge as the central challenge to the Democrats leading up to the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential primary.
There’s also an argument to be made for holding fire. We still don’t know the many reasons why Trump won this election, but one of the main ones is likely to be frustration with the economy (a top issue in pre-election polling) and inflation, which was even worse in the United States than in New Zealand. When viewed in that light, a member of the incumbent administration like Harris or Biden, or even a member of the incumbent party unaffiliated with the Biden administration was always going to face a tough road to the White House, much like Labour was probably never going to win our 2023 election.
This arguably makes things even more difficult for the Democrats: if you can’t know what went wrong, how can you begin to fix it? There’s every chance the party’s internal politics in the next couple of years won’t be a battle over fixing what went wrong, but over deciding what the things that went wrong actually were. In this respect, the party’s best chance of getting itself into a winning shape might rest with the Trump administration being so odious to Democrat sensibilities that he forces unity upon them, taking their eye off any internal difficulties.
The arguments for each side of this battle were made today by two of its potential protagonists, former President Barack Obama, and Senator Bernie Sanders, a former presidential candidate.
Obama issued a statement saying the election followed a trend of incumbent governments around the world collapsing in the face of high inflation - not Harris and Biden’s fault, or the fault of anyone who followed Obama’s moderate playbook, in other words.
“As I said on the campaign trail, America has been through a lot over the last few years - from a historic pandemic and price hikes resulting from the pandemic, to rapid change and the feeling a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do.
“Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune,” Obama said.
Sanders, by contrast, tore into the Democrats saying it “should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them”.
He said that the white working class, which flocked to Trump in 2016, had been joined by Latino and black members of the working class too.
“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he said, before urging supporters to “stay tuned” for more news.
Harris didn’t linger on the stage, grabbing the hand of her bored looking husband, Doug Emhoff and disappearing shortly after her speech. Despondent young staffers filed out of the university fairly quickly too, leaving only students and members of the international media with inconveniently timed news bulletins.
Howard University’s lawn is ringed with trees painted in the colours of its various sororities and fraternities. At the far corner of the field, a group of about 20 women from Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, predominantly dressed in pink, gathered under their tree and held hands in a circle.
Some weeping, they sang the sorority’s hymn, “hearts that are loyal/ and hearts that are true/ by merit and culture/ we strive and we do/ things that are worthwhile/ and with a smile/ we know each other/ for we know there’s no other/ like our sisterhood”.
Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the Press Gallery since 2018.
The victory could give Trump a broad mandate to pursue an agenda of radical change.