Vice President Kamala Harris ended election night without addressing the already dwindling crowd at her watch party at Howard University, which turned from vibrant to somber over the course of six hours.
“Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond told the crowd just after 12 a.m. on Wednesday. “We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken.” Before Richmond stepped behind the seal, “Kamala” chants had broken out from supporters thinking they would see the Democratic nominee.
Richmond’s purpose was to dismiss the once packed crowd — though they had already begun to dismiss themselves. “You won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” he added, promising that she would address her supporters at her alma mater later on Wednesday.
His announcement was met with loud gasps and disappointment.
Harris aides had remained virtually silent until Richmond spoke, choosing to communicate via a background email thread to publicize their view of the race and memos to give officials and allies their case for why they should keep the faith.
By midnight, Harris’ path to victory had already substantially narrowed. The Associated Press called North Carolina for Trump, and the former president won Georgia soon after, while maintaining leads in the “blue wall” states.
Some Harris allies and aides milled about after Richmond left the stage, visibly upset, clearly surprised by the results and questioning what had gone wrong to make the map look so red so quickly.
“I was very shocked about the call in North Carolina,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who has been campaigning for Harris in battleground states, told NOTUS just after she heard the call.
Others were more direct: “I want to go home, get in my own bed and cry,” said one person who has been in the vice president’s orbit since her first run for president.
Another House Democrat in the Congressional Black Caucus left campus early, telling NOTUS they had been repeatedly checking their phones, nervous for updates on Democrats’ prospects in both the House and the presidential race.
And a third simply replied to a Signal with one word: “brutal.”
Many parroted campaign talking points that there was still time for the map to turn around (technically, still true) and for Harris to be victorious.
“There’s still a while to go,” one senior aide told NOTUS just after 11 p.m. “Detroit hasn’t even been counted.”
Leaving Howard’s campus, Richmond quickly told reporters he was still “hopeful.”
And Steven Benjamin, a senior adviser to the Biden administration, told NOTUS in a walking interview while he was leaving, “We haven’t lost anywhere we were supposed to win.” When asked if he was surprised by North Carolina, he said no, but Georgia was a different story.
“I expected more out of Georgia,” he said. Benjamin had left a dinner at the White House with the president earlier in the evening, alongside other assistants to the president, and said Biden was “enthusiastic” about the results when he left him, and Benjamin himself was still hopeful.
But it’s unclear how far that hope truly extends.
“I think people are disappointed and concerned,” one Democratic operative close to the Harris campaign said about the current mood at campaign headquarters. Another senior Democrat with a direct line to the campaign leadership said the mood at the vice president’s residence was “stale.”
Leadership — a small group of whom have been holed up in the vice president’s residence watching the results trickle in while others were in the war room in Wilmington, Delaware — still believes Harris has a narrow but existent path to victory, running through the “blue wall,” and have relayed as much to the vice president, the senior Democrat said.
But the reality for others has already started to set in, with the most hope lingering on the House.
And to that point, before Richmond took the stage, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi entered the Blackburn University Center flanked by a large entourage and told NOTUS she was feeling “very good,” and that she was getting “good reports.”
But it was unclear which body of government she was talking about.
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.