Democrats feel 2016 all over again in Harris-Trump battle

Democrats started election night feeling genuinely optimistic about Vice President Harris’s chance of becoming the nation’s first female president.

But as the evening wore on and former President Trump began to surpass 200 electoral votes, Democrats said they began to get the same sinking feeling they had eight years ago when Trump shocked the political world and defeated Hillary Clinton.

“I've got a gnawing 2016 PTSD feeling in the pit of my stomach,” one Democratic strategist said.

“This is beginning to feel eerily similar to 2016,” another strategist said. “We came in tonight thinking our chances were good. The internals were showing a path and a chance of winning most of the battlegrounds.”

Democrats speaking before cameras were more careful with their wording, but the worries came through.

“Loudoun County, Virginia’s not great. Think Dulles Airport, suburban Washington — [I] think [President Biden] was like 62 percent in 2020. I’m seeing 57, 58 right now,” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said Tuesday night during an appearance on Amazon’s live election coverage panel “Election Night Live” hosted by Brian Williams.

“There are troubling signs out there, but we got a big vote coming out of Philadelphia,” the veteran consultant added. “Let’s just wait a second. Let’s see what happens in North Carolina and Georgia, but I would be less than honest if I didn’t say the early indications here are not sterling.”

Decision Desk HQ, The Hill’s partner for election night, has projected Trump as the winner of both North Carolina and Georgia, two of the seven swing states Trump and Harris were battling for.

The Harris campaign said its most viable path toward victory remains wins in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Wins in all three of those states remained possible, though The New York Times’s political needle pointed to Harris’s political difficulties. It showed Trump with an 89 percent chance of winning the election around midnight.

DecisionDeskHQ showed Trump with an 83 percent chance of winning as of 11:30 p.m.

As they waited for results in all seven of the battleground states, some results were unsettling to Democrats.

Trump won Florida by a larger margin than four years ago, including Miami-Dade County, underscoring the Sunshine State’s shift.

Virginia was a closer race than expected, and when Trump won Iowa, it poured cold water on a shock-poll which came out over the weekend and declared Harris ahead of Trump, giving Democrats hope that Harris could win a string of other battleground states. 

As the night wore on, the Harris campaign said they still remained hopeful that she could win the blue wall. 

Campaign co-chair Jen O'Malley Dillon sent an email to campaign staff noting that the clearest path to victory was through those states. “And we feel good about what we're seeing,” she wrote.  

In Pennsylvania, O'Malley Dillon pointed out that the campaign “overperformed turnout expectations in Philadelphia and overperformed in our early vote expectations in Bucks County.” 

In Michigan, she noted, “we are awaiting a significant amount of votes to come in. The City of Detroit won't be reported out until roughly midnight, but we have seen strong turnout throughout the early vote and Election Day there.”

And she said in Wisconsin, “we know there is a significant amount of cote remaining in Dane and Milwaukee counties.”

Still as of 11:30 p.m., Trump held leads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, causing some panic among Democrats. He was also winning the popular vote, after losing it in the past two election cycles to Clinton and President Biden. 

Some Democrats said they still held out hope that Harris could win. 

But as one strategist put it, “This ----ing sucks. There's no sugarcoating it. In some ways, this is worse than 2016 because we know exactly what we're getting from Trump and it ain't good.”