Republican former President Donald Trump was leading Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in early vote tallies Tuesday though key battleground states remained undecided in the tight presidential race that left Bay Area Democrats grim-faced and Republicans buoyant.
A Harris campaign spokesman said late Tuesday that with many votes still to count, Harris would wait to address her supporters until Wednesday. After election experts called battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina for Trump, he was expected to speak to reporters later in the evening.
If Trump’s narrow lead over Harris in other battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin holds, it could propel him to a return to the White House that seemed unfathomable to many four years ago after his second impeachment for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and block certification of his loss to President Joe Biden.
Across the Democrat-dominated Bay Area, where Harris grew up and spent her career as a prosecutor and California politician, hardy groups of Republicans welcomed the early returns where Trump was dominating the Southern states and making headway across the north.
Mary Piscitelli, Rossmoor Republican Club treasurer, center celebrates with Liz Ritchie, of Knightsen, left, and Rico Ramirez, of Concord, celebrate as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is projected to win North Carolina during the Contra Costa County GOP Election Watch Party at the Back Forty Texas BBQ Roadhouse & Saloon in Pleasant Hill, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
“I expect a landslide,” said Liz Ritchie at a GOP watch party in Pleasant Hill. “There are enough people saying, ‘what happened to my country in the last four years?’ that they want Trump back as our president.”
For Harris’s oldest friends from the Bay Area, who supported her campaigns for San Francisco District Attorney, state Attorney General, U.S. Senator and Vice President, the possibility of a Trump win was bewildering.
“I never understood why she had to fight so hard in this race, with the opponent she’s up against,” said Amelia Ashley-Ward, editor of the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s oldest Black newspaper. “You look at Kamala’s resume. What are we doing here? Why are we going back, when she’s trying to take us forward?”
Geri Witting, a supporter for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, reacts as a TV news coverage calls Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, the projected winner in North Carolina at the Democratic watch party in the Democratic Volunteer Center in Mountain View, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
If she won, Harris, 60, would be the first woman president and the first of South Asian heritage in U.S. history. Trump, 78, would be the first in more than a century to win again after losing re-election.
The choice has polarized the country for months and led to anxiety among voters — especially Bay Area Democrats watching early returns.
“The American people are not stupid, they’ve caught on to criminals coming here illegally, open borders, the inflation rate,” said Adam Baker, an entrepreneur at a GOP watch party. “They talk about how Trump is all for the rich. But it’s been proven the last four years, the people who are for the rich are Democrats.”
Democrat Jim Gold, hosting an Election Night watch party at his San Jose home, and fearful that Trump might win, said early Tuesday, “We’re going to have alcohol, gummies and a little cyanide, just in case.”
The divisive race has left Americans exhausted and on edge, Sonoma State Political Science Professor David McCuan said.
“It’s like the nation wants to have this collective exhale,” McCuan said. “They’re concerned about the economy. They’re concerned about immigration and crime and abortion. But they’re also really concerned about the state of our nation, and all of this gives them a lot of anxiety and fatigue.”
The presidential contest followed an unprecedented trajectory. President Joe Biden faced restless fellow Democrats as Trump tapped voter frustration over sharp inflation, chaos at the U.S. border and wars in Ukraine and Israel that erupted under his administration. That unease burst into the open after Biden’s disastrous June debate performance against Trump.
Republicans in July overcame qualms about Trump’s polarizing antics and legal problems to nominate him a third time, galvanized after an assassination attempt by a gunman whose bullets nicked Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania rally, killed a supporter and raised national tensions.
Less than a month later, Biden, 81, would become the first sitting president since 1968 to abandon his re-election. Democrats quickly and remarkably coalesced around Harris who as vice president could seamlessly tap into Biden’s campaign funds and avoided a contested primary.
It was a brand new race. As Harris took the stage at packed rallies talking about her middle class roots growing up in Berkeley, where her parents took her to 1960s civil rights rallies in a stroller, Harris quickly pulled ahead of Trump in some polls and saw a surge in campaign funding, hauling in $1 billion in the first three months of her campaign, ” more than double the Trump campaign’s take. She promised to fight for Americans the way she did for Californians as San Francisco’s district attorney and the state’s attorney general.
Yet Harris’s momentum leveled off, the race tightened and anxieties rose. With the election playing out in the battleground states, Trump and Harris visited California primarily for private fundraising events with wealthy donors. The race divided Silicon Valley: venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman backed Harris, investor David Sacks and Tesla founder and X social media owner Elon Musk backed Trump.
Most Californians watched helplessly as the battle unfolded elsewhere, contributing what they could to the campaigns, phone banking and sometimes knocking on doors in neighboring Nevada and Arizona. But their political divisions over the two candidates burned as white-hot as they did across the country.
Harris supporters called Trump a threat to democracy for his refusal to concede his 2020 loss to Biden, unfounded election fraud claims and his supporters’ Capitol riot to disrupt Biden’s presidential certification. They called him unfit for his felony conviction over hush money payments to an adult film star and his election interference and classified documents indictments. They decried his Supreme Court nominees’ reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that led to 21 states banning or severely restricting access to abortion.
Trump supporters called the Biden-Harris administration a disaster that ushered inflation, a surge in illegal border crossings fueling drug abuse and crime, foreign wars and oppressive pandemic mask and vaccine mandates and lockdowns.
As the race entered its final week, Democrats aired fears Trump would again contest the election, and unleash his supporters yet again in some sort of violent power grab. Republicans saw a Harris win as nationalizing leftist policies that dogged her home state with high costs and taxes, homelessness, drug abuse and crime. Encounters with the opposing party erupted in shouting and worse. A Bay Area Democrat canvassing for Harris in Reno said Trump “scares the living daylights out of me,” a Republican volunteering at the San Jose headquarters said he’s “terrified” of a Harris win.
“Whatever happens, half the country is going to wake up with the awareness that the person they abhor, who they can’t understand how they won, they’re going to have to live with for four years,” said UC San Diego Political Science Professor Thad Kousser. “When the legal challenges play out, we’re going to learn a lot about our country and whether our commitment to Democracy is strong.”
Bay Area News Group Staff Writers Kate Talerico, Martha Ross and freelance reporter Sana Dadani contributed to this report.