Before heading to an Election Night watch party Tuesday, Noelle Smyth reached for a bottle of Ridge Montebello wine to celebrate with friends what she hoped would be a resounding victory for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
But when she looked at the label, she suddenly felt queasy. The vintage was 2016 — the year she donned her pantsuit and pearls and watched Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy go down in flames to Donald Trump.
Smyth put the bottle back. But it wasn’t enough to ward off impending doom. Wearing a Susan B. Anthony necklace from her late mother who had fought for abortion rights in the 1960s, Smyth, 58, headed to the Democratic volunteer center in Mountain View, then watched in bewilderment as Trump won not only the battleground states, but is projected to win the popular vote across the country.
“This can’t be,” she said to a friend. “This is a bad dream.”
Now Harris voters — especially California Democrats and those in the Bay Area where Harris grew up — who have long found a comfortable home in California’s liberal bubble are now wondering whether they will be confronting an even more pervasive form of political isolation. Trump didn’t just recapture his hard-core base. He expanded it across the country.
“I’m hoping that California is big enough to hold its own, but I don’t know,” said Laurie Stewart, 62, of San Jose, who founded a local activist group that has been meeting weekly to support Democratic campaigns. She’s heartbroken by the loss, she said, but “I’m not surprised because that’s the dystopia we’re living in.”
Wednesday morning, Harris conceded the race, telling supporters that “while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
Harris’s supporters tried to make sense of the news that more than half the country voted for a convicted felon who inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol after he refused to admit he lost the 2020 election, someone who was found liable for sexual abuse, and promised to seek revenge on his enemies — not to mention using vile language to describe the vice president and other antics.
“It’s just befuddling to me how America can elect someone with the character of our new president-elect,” said Zina Slaughter of Richmond, who on Sunday joined a “Win with Black Women” call, then Wednesday canceled her flight to Washington, D.C. where she planned to attend the presidential inauguration. “I’m so very disappointed in America.”
Harris, 60, who was born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, spent her 107-day campaign trying to appeal to the middle class with family friendly policies and draw in women and young voters upset with the former president’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
After an ebullient August Democratic convention, the campaign that Trump had been winning against President Joe Biden seemed to shift in her favor. Donor money poured in, celebrities like Taylor Swift touted endorsements, polls started shifting in her favor. Then her momentum stalled, and Democrats’ anxieties returned.
The campaigns exposed deep divides between the candidates and polarized the nation.
“No matter who won this election, it’s clear that we’ve become two separate Americas, and neither America understands the other one or has much of an interest in understanding the other one,” said political analyst and USC professor Dan Schnur.
“That leaves California in the exact same place that conservatives in Texas and Florida were in four years ago. You either dig in and get even angrier and fight back even harder, or you try to understand why there’s people on the other side who don’t agree with you.”
California, long a conservative target, became Trump’s frequent foil and Harris the face of its troubled policies on homelessness, drugs and crime and the skyrocketing price of gas and housing. In Trump’s final speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before Tuesday’s election, he called her a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco.”
In some ways, San Francisco — an epicenter of “wokeness” — has self-moderated in recent years, kicking out school board members during the COVID pandemic who spent more time renaming politically incorrect schools than getting kids back to class, and recalling a district attorney voters found too soft on crime. Statewide, after national media for years showed images of thieves ransacking drug stores, Californians approved a ballot measure that tightened penalties on theft.
But Harris still represented the liberal ideals she told voters were ingrained in her since the days her parents took her in a stroller to civil rights rallies at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
It’s that tension between the red and blue states, the Trump and Harris voters, that continues to divide the country in the election’s aftermath. Smyth, who left that 2016 bottle of Ridge Montebello at home Tuesday, said she’s not quite sure what comes next.
“I wish that I could say that I’m just going to sit on my couch and eat bonbons for the next four years, but I’m not going to give up completely,” Smyth said. “Everybody’s just got to stay strong, mentally, physically — say a serenity prayer, pretty much right now.”