“I’m trying not to jinx it but I think we’ll be okay,” a man said to a woman next to him, in a room with very high ceilings and painted columns.
“I’m optimistic,” she responded. And after a breath, “But I’m also…” She lost her words there, looked up and away at the fancy ceiling, down to the ground, and back at the man next to her until he changed the topic.
Election night at the Driskill Hotel. A building erected in the 19th century, now booming with the muddied voices of MSNBC anchors and with the chatter of people draining beer bottles at an anxious clip.
Nearby, a man with shaggy blond hair leaned against a column – one of those architectural choices that I suppose nods to early Americans’ reverence for Greece, for their lofty democratic notions. He said his wife didn’t want him to come to the Travis County Democratic Party’s election night watch party. She said: You have a wife and kids. Anybody can just walk in there.
But he was thrilled to be standing so near to some of our progressive electeds. Thought it was just great. “They’ll actually talk to you,” he said. To his right, state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt was just walking in, dressed as casually as, I suppose, a Democrat dresses when they’re running uncontested in a deep blue place. Just behind him, state Rep. Donna Howard laughed in pleasant conversation. U.S. Rep. Greg Casar was down the hall, illuminated by a videographer’s bulb.
The man by the column said he was excited to talk with a representative. All I could think was how strange it was that, with these guests on this night, we hadn’t walked through a metal detector to get in.
I’ve been pretty certain for months that Trump would win. There have been moments when that became very clear to me: a friend’s boyfriend complaining about Biden causing inflation, a crowd at a rodeo laughing at a clown’s racist jokes, a man my age at a bar dressed like a young professional liberal, gushing about his awakening in India before descending into grievances about Venezuelan gangsters and people speaking Arabic in New York City. For these, and a million other reasons, I expected our electorate to choose Trump, even though he promises to act as an autocrat, and maybe because he does.
In Travis County, I found myself in a crowd that, seemingly, had not arrived at that same conclusion.
People were smiling. They cheered when results confirmed blue states stayed blue, and when Philadelphia County went for Kamala Harris. They mused about the feeling that we were on the precipice of electing our very first woman president. They talked about their experiences canvassing, how people can’t just give up on Texas.
And then I watched the reality sink in.
Dazed in the middle of the room, I watched a man rub slow circles over his stomach. The woman next to him wrapped her cardigan around herself, pulled it tight, crossed her arms, let it go, and did it all over again.
A woman passed them. Glass of wine in her hand, eyebrows lifted, eyes on the floor, blinking over and over, blowing air out of a narrow mouth.
Standing on the balcony, after North Carolina was called for Trump and it seemed Georgia would be soon, I heard the most raucous cheering yet coming from inside. There was that rare clacking noise, like someone swinging around a noisemaker. I rushed in thinking I’d missed Harris winning Pennsylvania, only to find that a Driskill staffer was wheeling in a stack of chairs. That was the applause? A chance to sit down?
Early in the night, when results came in favoring Trump, there was a roomful of people booing. Like sports. Two hours later, it was a handful of women’s voices breaking as they moaned “noooo.” Like how people say “no” when they’re informed of a death and don’t want to believe it.
I guess we believe it now. Maybe not that this spells death for our democracy. But certainly, we have witnessed the death – or maybe, hopefully, the hibernation – of a period when most of us believed in and prioritized democratic values. When one of the world’s leading experts in fascism, who used to caution against using the word to describe Trump, now says “it’s the real thing. It really is,” I guess we have to accept it. When European newspapers declare things like “the end of an American world,” and describe Trump’s return as confirmation that our country is no longer the “shining city on a hill,” I guess we better listen. When Trump’s own former chief of staff is calling him a fascist, and recalling how he wished for generals like Hitler’s, I guess we have a lot of work to do. But where do we begin?
This article appears in November 8 • 2024.