After months of upheaval, plenty of despair and some joyful optimism, Democrats will soon be out of the White House and a second era of Donald Trump will begin.
Vice President Kamala Harris fell short. President Joe Biden, the furtive leader of the party, will be gone. And after one of the most high-intensity campaigns in modern U.S. political history, there are no obvious answers for how Democrats can find their way back from the political wilderness.
On Tuesday night, Howard University’s Yard was supposed to be filled with proverbial glass, shattered from the highest ceiling in politics. Instead, it was filled with despondent Democrats, pacing around as they confronted the harsh reality that Harris would likely not be successful in her historic bid for the White House.
The vice president didn’t address the crowd at her alma mater. Her supporters waited for hours on an unseasonably warm night in D.C. as the results turned Trump’s way. A little after 12:40 a.m., Harris’ campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, spoke to the shrunken crowd, as audience members at one point chanted “KAMALA” thinking it would be her to show up behind the vice presidential seal and not Richmond.
“Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” Richmond told the crowd, before clarifying that Harris wouldn’t be making an appearance.
But not long after Richmond delivered his message did the worst news come: Harris had lost Pennsylvania, effectively crushing her pathway to 270 electoral votes through the “Blue Wall.”
Howard’s press filing area — a place that would have been filled with campaign aides if Harris were winning — was barren with the exception of some reporters. One senior adviser, who said they had just flown in from Atlanta, continued to say “they weren’t plugged in” once the vote started to turn.
As results from crucial states started to finalize, the loss began to settle in for Democrats and the Harris allies.
“I was very shocked about the call in North Carolina,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who has been campaigning for Harris in the battlegrounds, told NOTUS.
“I expected more out of Georgia,” said Steven Benjamin, Biden’s Director of Public Engagement.
One aide, who had been hopeful through most of the night that Harris could overcome the headwinds, had a simple text message for NOTUS: “I’m sick.”
Questions will swirl in the coming days if Tuesday’s results are the result of a poorly run campaign or something much larger, like a country reluctant to ever elect a woman to the White House.
Democrats had entered Election Day more optimistic than they’d been in previous weeks, not quite a whiplash but a marked shift in energy, as Harris went all out in the battleground states and Trump struggled to stay on message.
Recent events like the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally, featuring racist comments about Black voters and Puerto Rico, provided Democrats a windfall of focus group data that suggested late deciders would break their way. Americans had finally started paying attention, aides believed, and were forced to look at “Trumpism” up close.
But the new vibe shift didn’t hold for long. Democrats weren’t successful. Harris won’t be president. And the worst fears for Democrats have finally come to pass: four more years of Trump.
“This president essentially said he doesn’t want people to be able to challenge him,” said Rep. Troy Carter, second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. “A presidency like that will be the absolute demise of what America has built.”
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said the worst is yet to come. “I don’t think many people who are supporting him have thought about all the consequences of his presidency,” he said. “But they will — they will see it.”
Democrats will now have to reckon with life as a Trump opposition party, with the former president no longer unaccustomed to Washington and his own power. A newly flipped Senate majority for Republicans, with their majority growing by the hour as more returns come in, was also a blow. In the final days of the election, Democrats were projecting confidence that the chamber might not flip.
For Harris’ supporters, it was a sad ending to an unparalleled election, which her aides routinely described as a toss-up. In the final days of the race, Harris’ team doubled down on their efforts to shore up the “Blue Wall” route, with Harris spending the three days leading up to Election Day in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Blame is already ricocheting around Democratic circles. Harris shedding voters of color, including Black and Latino men, was a clear let down. Her messaging, tacking to the middle to appeal to a more moderate base, instead of focusing on turning out the progressive vote, failed on all accounts. Harris not breaking with Biden significantly or early enough also seemed to be a mistake. Her continued support for the administration’s stance on Gaza didn’t help. And her choice of a vice presidential candidate, who apparently didn’t help her win anywhere or improve her standing with rural voters, will be a source of second- and third- and fourth-guessing.
Other Democrats say the fundamentals of this election were too steep for any Democrat, after years of high inflation.
“Maybe Democrats were always going to fucking lose, and she did great by keeping us alive, because if Joe Biden was still on the ticket, it would haven been over weeks ago,” said one senior Democrat in Pennsylvania.
Hanging over everything is Biden’s decision to run for reelection to begin with. Biden clung to his office despite persistent concerns that he would be too old to successfully campaign — to say nothing of serving as president well into his 80s. His party failed to spur an open primary at the start of this year, which could have produced a different candidate and at least would have given the Democratic candidate more time to prepare a general election campaign.
But ultimately, what is clear to most in the party is that with this setback, Democrats will have to dig deep and do some soul searching.
“We really have to do some internal kind of sitting around and reckoning with ourselves,” said Crockett, who was a surrogate for Harris during her three-month campaign. She said Democrats would have discussions about “what does it look like to engage in organizing consistently, instead of just waking up once every four years and trying to do something.”
The vice president’s loss is a 180-degree turn from the height of her campaign soon after Biden stepped down from the ticket in late July.
Harris quickly shored up support for her presidential bid, and she injected some much needed energy and hope into the race for Democrats.
Harris’ ascension largely closed the gaps in the race, particularly in battleground states like North Carolina, where Democrats saw renewed momentum after a narrow loss in 2020. Harris also inherited a robust campaign infrastructure that Biden’s aides had laid out for a rematch against Trump.
But all that early momentum wasn’t enough. After Harris excelled in an early September debate against Trump, Trump refused to debate again and Harris failed to find a new windfall of momentum until the very end. At least, it looked like Harris had some momentum at the end.
The vice president struggled to recreate the coalition that sent Barack Obama to the White House, and she saw declines with nearly every demographic compared to Biden.
For Craig Snyder, a former GOP nominee for Congress in Pennsylvania who campaigned and voted for Harris, there were always signs that her strategy might not be enough.
“We’ve had, from the beginning of this race, a majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track. That amount of people is very predictive of what’s going to happen to the incumbent party,” he said.
Harris also wrestled with how to telegraph the differences between Biden’s presidency and her would-be administration.
Asked in an interview with The View in early October if she would have done something differently than Biden as president, her answer became famous: “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”
The Trump campaign amplified the quote for weeks, as Harris tried to tweak her answer later when asked similar questions by other journalists.
Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow — which focuses on Gen Z voters — said her loss signals the “anti-incumbent wave” pulling voters away from familiar campaigns.
Harris also received consistent pressure from the progressive wing of her party to break away from Biden’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war. While demanding that critical aid be delivered to Palestinians facing a humanitarian crisis in the region, Harris kept returning to the declaration that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
The path that Harris took to Election Day wasn’t smooth. Her unsuccessful bid for president in 2019 ended in disarray, and Harris not only struggled to capture a strong coalition of voters during the Democratic primary, her campaign also faced financial pressure.
Harris’ campaign was plagued with internal fighting in its final days. Although she enjoyed early momentum, she didn’t even make it to Iowa. She ultimately left the race weeks before any votes were cast.
Harris’ first two years as vice president were fraught, as she waded through a deluge of damaging stories about staff mismanagement and tensions with the West Wing left her sidelined.
Vice Presidential historian Joel Goldstein said Harris came in where there wasn’t “sort of a natural role for her” in the same way that there was for other recent vice presidents.
Her aides spent years trying to rehabilitate her image, focusing on reconnecting with Harris’ longtime advocates and finding new ones in an attempt to build a firewall of support for when the detractors got too loud. She seemed to find her voice after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, establishing a platform on reproductive rights that foreshadowed her campaign as the nominee.
And yet, despite her loss, many Democrats agree that Harris performed as well as she could have under the circumstances.
“She should have no regrets, because the nature of this campaign was so unique and so unprecedented that even if she ran as close to a flawless campaign as possible, the dynamics were just too tough for her to overcome,” said Brian Brokaw, who ran Harris’ campaigns for attorney general and the Senate. “In fact, she, up until that point, had been all but written off by the political chattering class, and people were calling her a liability on the ticket. And then everything we know happened happened, and she got to stand in her own right, in her own shoes, and she shined.”
Her devastating loss, however, raises doubt about the future of her political career. Privately, people close to Harris have questioned whether she could run again in 2028, in what is likely to be a fierce open primary that pits successful Democratic governors and other party leaders against each other.
Others have defended her, saying Harris’ options should be wide open for whatever she wants to do.
“We need her. We need a champion,” said Lateefah Simon, a mentee and surrogate of Harris who has known her since 2003. “Kamala’s not going anywhere.”
As for the party itself, Democrats say they’ll have to mourn this loss and settle on a plan to push back against the former president. Trump has vowed to use the federal government to attack his enemies and break down fundamental parts of the government.
“I am from a generation of activists that say, you dust yourself up and you fight — fight the next fight. Yeah, you grieve and you fight the next fight,” said Sen. Laphonza Butler, an ally of the vice president. “We can’t give up on the experiment of this country. It’s our future generations who deserve to have it as well.”
Harris, who had spent part of her Tuesday drafting election night remarks with aides at the vice presidential residence, will likely echo that sentiment.
But the question in the early morning hours of Wednesday, when reporters were told to take all their belongings from the filing center, was when?
“So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow,” Richmond said. “She will be back here tomorrow.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.
Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.