On November 5 Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential Election by a large margin. It was over before it began, and I know because I watched as it happened.
Fellow student journalist Quinn Dobson and I were broadcasting from 8 pm to midnight on Old Westbury Web Radio (OWWR), reading poll numbers for the national and local elections. Of course, our main entree that night was the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and now president-elect Donald Trump.
Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race back in July seemed to have reinvigorated the Democratic party. Harris, of course, became the Dems candidate, and according to an NPR statistic, she raised about $200 million in her first week. She chose Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate, and for those first two months it seemed like the U.S. was going to get its first woman president.
So where did it all go wrong? Over the course of those four hours I saw states ping pong from red to blue on Politico’s electoral map. Trump had a strong lead since the start, but it was a similar scenario in 2020. If Biden could clinch that one, then certainly Harris could pull the rabbit out the hat…right? Right?!
Wrong! Harris’ campaign flew right off the tracks at about 9:30, shortly after the polls closed in New York. States like Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin that had been fervently changing colors suddenly became ill with a deep red. I couldn’t believe it. I was coping live on air: “Arizona is so close though,” I remember saying. “She can pull it off there! It’s only a 3,000 vote difference!”
At the end of the broadcast, Dobson and I were drained: vocally, mentally, and spiritually. When I got home it was clear that Harris lost, and the reasons were obvious to anyone who paid attention.
First, she had no real policies for the first month of her campaign. A policy page wasn’t added to her official website until early September; much too late, even for a candidate who only started that summer.
Her policies were not all that different from Biden’s, which makes sense for his V.P., but Biden wasn’t exactly the most popular president. Her connection to Biden cost her the presidency. In Wisconsin and Michigan, the Dem. candidates won the Senate, but Harris couldn’t snag the popular vote. And the same seems to be the case for Arizona, although they haven’t finished counting the votes yet at the time of writing this article.
Second, she was far too much of a centrist. By trying not to push too hard on certain issues (like Israel’s genocide in Gaza) she just came across as an extension of Biden. An endorsement from former V.P and war criminal Dick Cheney didn’t help either.
What really irks me is the response to Trump’s win among some jaded leftists. The above-it-all smugness makes me sick. “One thing’s for certain, the next four years will be funny,” I’ve heard people say, like one of the callers on the Election Night Broadcast.
I agree, it is very entertaining to laugh at Trump’s crude speech pattern, word choice, and general demeanor; I do it all the time. But the guy is going to get inaugurated in January. For immigrants, or those with disabilities, or transgender people, the scant benefits they had are almost certainly going to vanish or dwindle. The GOP won a majority in the Senate, and are on track to win the House of Representatives. The Supreme Court is run amok with conservatives. While not every Republican is for Trump, I believe it’ll be easy for many of Trump’s policies to pass in Congress.
Having said all that, I don’t like Harris either. She makes claims no Dem. would have made 12 years ago, and comes across as incredibly conservative, emphasizing strong bipartisanship. If she won, Harris pledged that she would bring back a border wall bill. Trump famously campaigned on a Mexican border wall, but it has yet to be fully completed. She then claimed, in a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper, that “when it came time for [Trump] to do a photo op ….[he] did it on that part of the wall that President Obama built.”
She’s emblematic of the great issue in American politics; the tone deaf two-party system. The Democratic party is 196 years old, the Republican party is 170 years old. Neither of these fossil institutions speak to the youth in any meaningful way. While there are many statistics championing high youth turnout for each election, it’s ultimately because we are held hostage; told that every election is the most climactic of our lifetime
Voting for a third party has proven to be a toothless endeavor, too. So toothless in fact, that when I try to find the vote tallies on official news sites, like the Associated Press (AP), CBS, NBC, or CNN, I can only find the count for Harris and Trump. A Google search shows me the count, accredited to AP, but I can’t find anything for candidates like Jill Stein easily on the AP site itself.
The United States political landscape is melting. Everything is meshing together. Democrats try to work with Republicans who want nothing more than to get their own way.
The show ended at midnight. I’m fairly certain that Dobson and I were the only two people in the Student Union building. I left as soon as I could, after all I had work at 6 am. When I got home at 1 in the morning, as my head hit the pillow, I thought of only one thing: “In spite of anything that might happen, no matter who becomes president, I still hate George W. Bush more.”
