“We have to keep hoping.” Two men embrace in the banquet room of the idyllic 18th-century bed and breakfast where Bucks County Democrats have gathered on election night. That county, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, should have been one of the places that led Kamala Harris to victory in Pennsylvania, the largest of the seven swing states, and thus to the presidency. That turned out to be a vain hope, because Pennsylvania went to Trump.
“I’ve never been completely confident,” said 77-year-old retired nurse Beth Corso, one of several hundred party militants in the room. She still has the ‘I voted’ sticker she received at the polling station on her sweater. “All the Harris supporters I know have been extremely tense for weeks.”
All this time, Corso has continued to campaign, door to door, “every weekend”. In the final weeks of the campaign, Democratic volunteers from other states poured into Bucks County en masse. But as the ominous results follow one another on the big screen, the energy that has been building up for months collapses in a matter of hours.
By half past twelve, when three-quarters of the votes had been counted in Pennsylvania, most people had already left the room. Those who remain are not yet ready to draw conclusions, but the atmosphere is one of forced optimism. “The count will probably continue all night,” said state Sen. Steve Santarsiero during a short, no-frills speech. “I think Kamala Harris will win Bucks County and Pennsylvania. But we don’t know by what margin. Keep your spirits up.” That hope did not come true, Pennsylvania went to Trump.
Frying fries
Bucks County only narrowly went to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but went to Biden in 2020 by more than four percentage points. That doesn’t seem to be the case now. The county has many white working class voters on one side and wealthy residents on the other. Harris hoped to get many highly educated voters, and certainly women, to the polls. Quite a few of them abandoned the Republicans because of Trump’s extremism and role in dismantling federal abortion rights.
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Trump targeted white voters without a college education, still about half the electorate in Bucks County. That is why Republicans still saw potential in the suburbs of the Democratic metropolis of Philadelphia. It was no coincidence that Trump chose a McDonald’s in Bucks County to come and make fries at the end of the campaign.
The fact that the ex-president is back in the lead was difficult for Corso to process on Tuesday night. “I think we as Democrats feel like there was more at stake in this election. Because we see Donald Trump for who he is. He is a cult leader. When you knocked on the door of a Democratic household during the campaign, people would say to you, ‘My God, how can anyone support that man?’”
The bad guys in James Bond films
But the results on screen confirm once again that Americans live in different realities, she says. “It’s clear that some of us see him one way and the rest see him in a completely different way, as some kind of savior. But a convicted felon who makes sexually inappropriate comments about women all the time: I had never seen anything like that in a candidate for president of the United States before he came on the scene.”
“What has become of our country?” Jim Szwedo, another party militant from the town of New Hope, wonders out loud. “If Trump wins, it will be ten times worse than last time. He has all those conservative groups ready that have been working on plans like Project 2025 for ten years. And Musk as a financier, who will soon play efficiency expert for the government and cut away entire government departments. And Robert F. Kennedy, who may want to do away with all vaccines, as a possible Secretary of Health. Where do they find those people?”
He throws it out in exasperation. “Republicans have all these evil, but smart and corrupt types in their midst. They can fill the next hundred James Bond films with bad guys.”
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