American Battleground: How a single state took Harris down and raised the new era of Trump

When the sun falls from the darkening Washington, DC, sky, the electric crowd at Howard University appears certain it will rise brighter. Singing, cheering, linking arms and raising hands in the great outdoor quadrangle known as The Yard, they have come by the thousands to watch the election returns and witness history in a place where it has been made before.

The historically Black university has produced legendary authors and actors, esteemed scientists, the titanic Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the groundbreaking woman for whom the rapturous throngs have rallied tonight.

“And every time we hear a mention of Kamala Harris winning another state this crowd goes crazy!” a local television reporter says to her camera.

Academically, every soul here knows the vice president could lose. But in the way of true believers in every political campaign, they feel she is destined to win; that the polls will clang shut east to west and acclaim will echo back from the far ocean, across the Rockies and Plains, through the farms and industrial towns to the nation’s capital, where their candidate will become the first woman elected president of the United States.

Her whole campaign, after all, has been like a movie, and that’s how movies end. The fact that Harris — a Black and Asian American woman — will crush the man many Democrats see as dismissive of women and non-Whites, former President Donald Trump, is a delicious detail they will savor all their lives.