Photographs by OK McCausland

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir in brilliant-blue robes performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable. As the evening drew on, the clusters of giddy sorority sisters and VIP alumni stopped dancing, their focus trained on the projector screens, which were delivering a steady flow of at best mediocre and sometimes dire news for Democrats. No encouragement had yet come from those all-important blue-wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Somewhere between Georgia turning red and Senator Ted Cruz demolishing Colin Allred in Texas, attendees started trickling out the back.

It was starting to feel pretty obvious, even then, that Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. And soon after 5:30 a.m. eastern this morning, he was, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him, giving him an Electoral College majority even with a number of states yet to declare. An across-the-board rightward shift, from Michigan to Manhattan, had gradually crushed the hopes of Democrats in an election that, for weeks, polling had indicated was virtually tied. But a Trump victory was a reality that nearly everyone at Harris’s watch party seemed to have prepared for only theoretically.

Before last night, Democrats felt buoyant on a closing shot of hopium. While Harris stayed on message, Trump had what seemed a disastrous final week: His closing argument was incoherent; his rally at Madison Square Garden was a parade of racism; he stumbled getting into a garbage truck and looked particularly orange in photos. Democratic insiders crowed that early-vote totals were favoring Harris, and that undecided voters in swing states were coming around. Then there was Ann Selzer’s well-respected poll in Iowa, which suggested that the state might go blue for the first time since Barack Obama’s presidency.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

On a breezy and unseasonably warm evening in Washington, D.C., thousands of people had gathered on the grassy campus at Harris’s alma mater to watch, they hoped, history being made. No one mentioned Trump when I asked them how they were feeling—only how excited they were to have voted for someone like Harris. Kerry-Ann Hamilton and Meka Simmons, both members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, had come together to witness the country elect the first Black woman president. “She is so well qualified—” Hamilton started to say. “Overqualified!” Simmons interjected.

Leah Johnson, who works at Howard and grew up in Washington, told me that she would probably leave the event early to watch returns with her mother and 12-year-old daughter at home. “It’s an intergenerational celebratory affair,” she said. “I get to say, ‘Look, Mom, we already have Barack Obama; look what we’re doing now!’”

Everyone I spoke with used similar words and phrases: lots of firsts and historics and references to the glass ceiling, which proved so stubbornly uncrackable in 2016. Attendees cheered in unison at the news that Harris had taken Colorado, and booed at Trump winning Mississippi. A group of women in tight dresses danced to “1, 2 Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliott. Howard’s president led alumni in the crowd in a call-and-response that made the whole evening feel a little like a football game—just fun, low stakes.

Several people I talked with refused to entertain the idea that Harris wouldn’t win. “I won’t even let myself think about that,” a woman named Sharonda, who declined to share her last name, told me. She sat with her sorority sisters in their matching pink-and-green sweatshirts. Soon, though, the crowd began to grow restless. “It was nice when they turned off the TV and played Kendrick,” said one attendee who worked at the White House and didn’t want to share her name. “Just being part of this is restoring my soul, even if the outcome isn’t what I want it to be,” Christine Slaughter, a political-science professor at Boston University, told me. She was cautious. She remembered, viscerally she said, the moment when Trump won in 2016; and the memory was easy to conjure again now. “I know that feeling,” she said. She was consoling herself: She’d been crushed before. She could handle it again.

Harris herself was expected to speak at about 11 p.m., but by midnight, she still hadn’t appeared. People bit their cheeks and scrolled on their phones. There was a burst of gleeful whoops when Angela Alsobrooks beat Larry Hogan in Maryland’s U.S. Senate election. But soon the trickle of exiting attendees became a steady flow. Potentially decisive results from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not due soon, but Michigan didn’t look good. North Carolina was about to be called for Trump.

I texted some of my usual Democratic sources and received mostly radio silence in response. “How do you feel?” I asked one, who had been at the party earlier. “Left,” she answered. Mike Murphy, a Republican anti-Trump consultant, texted me back at about 12:30 a.m: “Shoot me.”

Donors and VIPs were streaming out the side entrance. The comedian Billy Eichner walked by, looking sad, as the Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache (Jump On It)” played over the loudspeakers. A man pulled me aside: “There will be no speech, I take it?” he said. It was more of a comment than a question.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

“I’m depressed, disappointed,” said Mark Long, a software salesman from D.C., who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harris as a child. He was especially upset about the shift toward Trump among Black men. “I’m sad. Not just for tonight, but for what this represents.” Elicia Spearman seemed angry as she marched out of the venue. “If it’s Trump, people will reap what they sow,” she said. “It’s karma.”

Just before 1 a.m., the Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond came onstage to announce that the candidate would not be speaking that night. The former Louisiana representative offered muted encouragement to the crowd—an unofficial send-off. “Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” he said, before adding, “Go, Kamala Harris!” The remaining members of the crowd cheered weakly. Some of the stadium lights went off.

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him to build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a re-elected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half-measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs–and intensify a global trade war against not only China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history when America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

Iowa Democrats had gotten their hopes up, and honestly, how could they not? On Saturday night, J. Ann Selzer—the most renowned pollster in Iowa, if not the entire country—released her final pre-election survey, finding that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump by three points in a state the former president had carried by eight in 2020.

The poll seemed to portend a big night for Harris not only in Iowa but across the Midwest, suggesting a surge of support from women that would virtually assure her election. It also found a pair of Democratic House candidates in Iowa leading Republican incumbents, pointing to a Democratic majority in the chamber.

On Monday night, as Democrats packed inside a gymnasium in Des Moines for a rally, Selzer’s survey was all anyone could talk about. “I know that was exciting,” Lanon Baccam, the Democrat running for the local congressional seat, told the crowd, which erupted in cheers at the mere mention of the poll, “but I don’t think anyone in this room is surprised.”

[Read: How to understand the election returns so far]

The following night, many of the same Democrats gathered for a watch party inside a hotel ballroom downtown, their hopes turning to nerves and finally to resignation as a far bleaker picture emerged. The Selzer poll was way off, and Trump was poised to win Iowa by his largest margin ever. Iowa Democrats haven’t had much to celebrate since Barack Obama’s victory in 2012, and last night wasn’t any different.

“Iowa has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Republicans are in the advantage right now,” Bill Brauch, the Democratic Party chair in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, told me. “We hoped that would change someday, but it isn’t today.”

Democrats had been optimistic about Iowa for the same reasons they were optimistic across the country. After foregoing most door-knocking due to the pandemic in 2020, they had built a robust turnout operation that dwarfed the GOP’s organizing efforts, which Democrats saw little evidence of as they canvassed neighborhoods. Enthusiasm, Brauch told me, was “through the roof.” And indeed, he said turnout was high in Des Moines. But more voters went Republican than Democrats expected, cutting into the margins that Democrats needed to offset the GOP’s strength in rural counties, where Republican turnout was also high.

The dynamic was the same across the country as returns came in: Despite strong turnout in many areas, Harris could not match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance in the counties that powered his victory over Trump. As of early Wednesday morning, the GOP had flipped at least two Senate seats, in West Virginia and Ohio, giving Republicans an all-but-certain majority, and they had a chance of ousting Democratic incumbents in several other battlegrounds that were too close to call. The House landscape was less certain, as Democrats still had a chance to flip enough GOP districts to recapture control.

They needed a net gain of four House seats for a majority, and although some of the party’s best pickup opportunities were in blue states such as New York and California, Democrats began seeing races in the Midwest trend in their direction in the closing weeks, opening up the possibility of more paths to the majority and larger gains nationally. But the Midwest surge did not materialize.

Democrats had poured late money into the two most competitive House races in Iowa, where they saw evidence that voters wanted to punish Republicans for enacting a state abortion ban—one of the strictest in the country—that took effect this summer following months of legal battles. In 2022, low Democratic turnout in places like Polk County helped Republicans flip a House seat, giving them all four in the state. The abortion ban, however, sparked hope among Democrats that Iowa would see the same blue shift that other states saw in 2022 after the Supreme Court overruled Roe—a belief that the Selzer poll reinforced.

Selzer has achieved a near-mythical status among political insiders. On Monday night, when I asked Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture and former two-term Iowa governor, whether he believed her latest findings, he replied with a detailed history of Selzer’s past predictive successes. In 2008, her polling correctly forecast that Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, and in both of the past two presidential elections, it came close to nailing Trump’s margin of victory when most other polls underestimated his support. “Anyone who doubts Ann Selzer when it comes to Iowa does so at their own risk,” Vilsack told me. “So do I believe it?” he added, referring to her Saturday poll. “Absolutely.”

On Tuesday night, the Democrats who showed up to rejoice instead realized that Selzer’s survey was just another poll—one of many that appeared to once again underestimate Trump’s support. As the night wore on, they held out hope that Baccam would defeat Representative Sam Nunn, a first-term Republican. (As of this writing, the Democrat in Iowa’s other competitive House race is narrowly trailing with nearly all precincts reporting.) But a podium set up for victory speeches stayed empty, and when, at around 11:20 p.m. local time the Associated Press called the race for Nunn, only a smattering of Democrats were there to see the news.

Brauch, the county Democratic chair, was at a loss to explain how his party fell so far short once more. “I don’t think any of us knows what the answer is,” he told me. “If we did, we’d be doing better tonight.”