RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
The race for the presidency hung in the balance Tuesday evening as battleground states continued counting votes and America waited to learn whether Oakland native and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris would make history or Republican former President Donald Trump would make an epic comeback.
The choice has polarized the country for months and led to anxiety among voters — especially Bay Area Democrats watching early returns.
“We’re going to have alcohol, gummies and a little cyanide, just in case,” said Democrat Jim Gold, hosting an Election Night watch party at his San Jose home, and fearful that Trump might win.
“I expect a landslide,” said Liz Ritchie, watching Trump take an early lead 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.”
Harris, 60, a former U.S. Senator for California, 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 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,” Mc- Cuan 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.”
Kate Talerico contributed to this report.