Harris's victory party at her alma mater ends in tears

Kamala Harris’s dream of becoming the first woman to be elected US president quickly turned into a nightmare for the crowd that gathered at Howard University late on Tuesday evening.

- JOHN BOWDEN

Election night was understandably depressing for Democrats. The party lost its majority in the Senate and saw Donald Trump set to return to the White House in January with a powerful conservative majority on the Supreme Court – the near worstcase scenario many in the party had been warning about for months.

The tears definitely flowed on the yard outside Frederick Douglass Hall as the night grew long and Harris campaign adviser Cedric Richmond told the crowd that the vice-president wouldn’t speak to them. Richmond vowed that the campaign would fight “overnight”, but Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania and other states made the realities clear.

The night began with serious optimism among Harris supporters; those who spoke to The Independent before the major battlegrounds began reporting returns. They spoke about her win like it was a near-certainty, and triumphantly asserted that the right’s cultural and political message had been successfully battled back. One transgender activist spoke about how the Trump campaign’s “entire closing argument of attacking transgender people” had been proven to “not actually penetrate for voters”.