It’s all over for Kamala Harris. The task for the Vice President to overhaul the leads Donald Trump has built in the blue wall swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is now too great.
The mood in the Democrat camp is despondent and Cedric Richmond, the party’s co-chair, has already announced to the remaining faithful gathered at Howard University in Washington DC that Harris will not be making any public comments until the morning.
When she does emerge, she will use the moment to concede the 2024 Presidential race to Donald Trump – and America, the UK and the rest of the world must now prepare for a second Trump administration, more organized, better prepared and more ruthless in its desire to reshape how the country is governed.
Backed by a Republican majority in the Senate (and possibly in the House too), it promises to be an administration that not only undermines much of the progress the US has made on social justice since the 1960s and one that undermines the basic democratic norms in place since the Second World War.
For the Democrats, the post mortem into how the party has so underperformed compared to 2020 has already begun.
They need to understand how Trump, a political pariah after he left office four years ago, can return to be the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in the US for 20 years. How the can pick up support among communities like Latinos or Black men once the preserve of Democrats? How has the party of FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton lost the support of so many traditional blue-collar workers?
In the wake of Harris’s elevation to the Democrat candidacy after Joe Biden withdrew from the race she managed to generate huge support among activist Democrats. Yet, despite this, she still had a mountain to climb to win the White House.
This was always going to be an extremely difficult task for an incumbent candidate to win this election. The cost of living crisis, immigration and the international security situation created headwinds that any Democrat would have struggled.
Biden should have announced he was standing down at least six months before, too, to give the party an attempt to find the best candidate to take on Trump. Harris herself would have been a stronger pick if she had gone through such a process and had time to build a deeper connection with voters.
But these are relatively marginal factors. There is something deeper that needs addressing about the loss of connection with large swathes of the voting population. The uncomfortable truth is that Trump has more successfully tapped into people’s concerns than Biden or Harris over the last 18 months.
This is a problem not just for the Democrats in the US. Despite the landslide victory in July, Labour’s connections with traditional communities of support in the UK has also weakened. It’s an issue that the centre-left across the western world has yet to come to terms with.
This is a disastrous result for progressive politics across and Keir Starmer will carry the dented hopes of the centre-left across the western world for some years to come.
Starmer must also think through the consequences of dealing with a Trump White House. It will be a bumpy ride but the two have already met in New York in September and the Prime Minister will be hoping that he can build a strong personal relationship to help protect and promote Britain’s interests over the next four years.
It’s been a long night here in the US. The time for a deep rethink begins tomorrow.
