At Howard University, A Bittersweet End To A Historic Presidential Campaign

Kamala Harris’s campaign for president of the United States ended with dancing. In the Yard of Howard University, from which the Vice President graduated in 1986, music started yesterday at 6:30pm, half an hour after the first polls closed, as Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha – wearing dresses, scarves, and jackets of their signature pink and green – stepped in coordinated movement.

Alumnae with grey in their hair danced alongside Howard students. Men studied the steps and began to join in. The dances are known as strolling, and were meant as both a tribute to Harris, a team dancer since her high school years, and a celebration of the many overlapping communities of which she is a part. The Vice President’s adult life started at Howard, in the capital where she now serves. Her campaign’s return there in the final hours of the election could be seen to have a simple meaning: bring it home.

The sorority sisters’ mode of togetherness with their heads high set the mood for the Harris campaign’s Election Night party – even as, across the evening, the gathering turned sober with news that Donald Trump had taken many of the crucial states on the electoral map and, apparently, the Electoral College. The mood in Washington earlier that day, as voters drifted from the polls, was upbeat and circumspect. In the Adams Morgan neighbourhood, a guy on a bike with speakers attached blared Harris’s anthem on the trail, Beyoncé’s “Freedom”. In Logan Circle, an elderly woman leaning on a cane had her hair sprayed bright blue.

The Georgian-brick Yard at Howard – perhaps the most storied of all historically Black colleges and universities – was trimmed with blazing maple leaves and two enormous American flags. By eight o’clock, as an eerie humidity swept through, the Yard became a centre of activity. Damaris Moore, Miss Howard University, sang the national anthem in a sparkling tiara, and the Howard Gospel Choir sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “Oh Happy Day”. “A lot of our classmates are here, and we’re very excited,” Portia Wenze-Danley, who was in Harris’s class at Howard, said. She was dressed in a shiny silver blazer, a sequined Howard “H” shirt, and a floppy hat. “Kamala had this dream and followed it – and now she has come home.”

Against so inevitable-seeming a homecoming, it could be hard to recall the sheer improbability of Harris’s campaign for the presidency, which launched, unexpectedly, just three months earlier, from the Vice President’s dining room table, with a hope and many prayers. In the final analysis, the campaign broke records for fundraising and, by some accounts, voter registration. But its greatest victory may have been in tone and tenor – the confidence and sense of stability with which it launched and sought to continue, the upbeat effect it managed to conjure in a dire and quite unsettled year.

“The reason why people came out is to show that we can celebrate in joy and not fear,” Angelica Melendez, another sorority member, said. “In 2020, we had the pandemic, so a lot of us couldn’t be together during election night. Today I felt it was really important to get out of the house and be in a community.” Trinity Nevette, who graduated from Howard last year, described the gathering as, “a moment for all little Black girls”.

And many others, it turned out: the crowd in the Yard last night, which grew to include thousands, reflected as many different causes as the coalition that Harris seemed to assemble against the spectre of the MAGA right. Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of the A4TE Education Fund, a trans equality group, recognised Harris as an early leader in overturning the so-called “panic defence” – “this horrible rule that if you attack or even murder a transgender person, you can try to blame the fact that you got startled or scared by them being trans” – with a different notion of a functional society than Donald Trump. “Trump attacked transgender Americans in his ads and made that a whole focus of his closing argument – but, then, he also did the same with immigrants in Springfield,” he said. “He’s trying to single out small, misunderstood minorities as scapegoats.”

And though the Harris campaign strategically tread lightly on the first-ness of Harris’s candidacy – she would be the first female president, and the first of two nonwhite parents – the crowd at Howard didn’t shy from noting what those barriers broken could mean. “My lifetime was spent watching women, strong women, fight for all these rights that I benefited from,” Katherine Cheng, who had flown in from Seattle to be there that night, said. “I’m really hoping we get the women who did not come out for Hillary Clinton, and Republican women, because their rights are also on the line.

“This election is going to shape our future,” she added. “It will either keep our democracy and keep all of our rights that all these people fought for, over a century. Or it will all go away.”

The first election data came in at eight o’clock from CNN, beamed onto giant screens across the Yard. Harris was leading in North Carolina – a great cheer rose across campus – while Trump led in Georgia. By 9:30pm, the first clear Harris victories had been declared, but much of the rest of the map was growing hazy. Pennsylvania – crucial to the Democrats’ Electoral College strategy, along with Michigan and Wisconsin – had Harris in the lead, but that could change. By 10:15pm, the cheer that accompanied the declaration of her win in Colorado seemed strained. Shortly after 11, CNN reported that the campaign had no plans to issue a verdict that night. Handheld flags, which had been waving across the Yard, were now held more tentatively – an unintentional half-mast.

A 20-year-old George Washington University student named Marianna Pecora stood on the edge of the Yard in a striped blouse and a leather jacket, sending tweets from her phone. She was the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow, a voter-mobilisation organisation focused on Generation Z. Over the past months, it reports having made contact with more than 32 million voters. “I was 13 when Donald Trump was elected – as a generation, we’ve been fighting against this for our whole political lives.” Pecora had grown up in San Diego as the daughter of an immigrant from Tijuana.