BY SARAH FERGUSON | It was hard getting up on Wednesday. On election night, many of us New Yorkers never went to sleep, glued to shapeshifting projections on CNN and other media that showed Hillary Clinton’s historic bid for the White House bottoming out, hour after hour, before our bewildered eyes.
It seemed like this torturous race was never-ending, a late-night horror show of collapsing hopes and predictions, not at all what we’d set out to accomplish when we left our homes to go vote on Tuesday.
I’d spent Tuesday morning on Facebook sparring with angry Bernie Sanders supporters, warning them that the dangers of a Trump presidency were too grave to consider a protest vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. They assured me that New York was a lock for HRC, that they had the luxury to vote their conscience. I got unfriended by a Latina Trump supporter, who argued that the mainstream media was being one-sided in its withering critiques of the Orange One. But she seemed an anomaly. Nothing to raise hackles on my skin.
Like the polls and the pundits, I figured Clinton had this.
At my polling place, I wrestled with whether voting for Clinton on the Working Families Party line was better than inking her in on the Democratic column — as a Sanders delegate had urged me.
“Don’t worry about it,” a poll worker advised. “Bernie’s gonna get a cabinet position from Clinton, no matter what.”
Afterwards, I dropped in at La Plaza Cultural community garden on E. Ninth St. and Avenue C, where about a dozen people had gathered to watch the returns live-streaming on a big screen in the middle of the tarmac.
At 7:30 p.m., Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was on FOX, dutifully tallying up the achievements of Trump’s outsider campaign, as if preparing to concede that his improbable bid for the presidency had failed.
Meanwhile, a giddy press corps was lapping up the vibe at Clinton’s election party at the Jacob Javits Center — where a podium was awaiting Clinton on a flashy stage worthy of the Oscars, with a lit-up outline of the United States laid out below the convention center’s vaulted glass ceiling. Everyone was waiting for Hillary to smash through.
“They keep talking about that glass ceiling,” a young bike messenger guy remarked. “Can someone, like, throw a rock up there and break it?”
Over bowls of vegetarian chili brewed on the garden’s propane stove, people shared their experiences voting. Several East Villagers said they’d stood in line for an hour or more to cast their votes, reflecting the surge of enthusiasm in this fraught contest.
“I’ve never waited in line to vote here, ever,” said filmmaker and garden advocate Charles Krezell, who said he’d queued up for an hour and a half to vote on E. Fourth St. between Avenues C and D. Aside from a few Steiners, everyone I talked to said they voted Clinton.
But in the rest of the nation, a whole different narrative was underway. At 7:50 p.m., Fox News called South Carolina for Trump, with just 1 percent of the national vote in. Forty minutes later, CNN was following suit.
Poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight.com were desperately backtracking on their sky-high predictions for a Hillary victory, their projections crumbling by the minute as the results trickled in.
“This is a nail-biter,” marveled CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at 8:30 p.m., with the electoral map evenly tied (68 for HRC; 66 for Trump). “Several of these states are going back and forth, up and down.”
The normally confident Jake Tapper seemed flummoxed: “I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
At 9 p.m., the networks called New York for Hillary. The Empire State, with its 29 electoral votes, had held.
But the other states were quickly falling to Trump. Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Utah, even Ohio, up for grabs. At 9:44 p.m., CNN announced that Republicans had secured the House.
Broward County, Florida, was once again hanging by a chad.
“There’s a buzz in the war room that can be heard across the nation,” a Trump spokesperson declared ominously.
“There is a path, there is a definite path for Trump,” Tapper concurred, adding, “If he wins, it will put a significant part of the polling industry out of business.”
Michigan and New Hampshire were flashing red. But the media projections were all over the map.
At 9:50, the Detroit Free Press called Michigan for Clinton, while Fox had the Mitten State going to Trump. Later the Free Press backpedaled: The paper’s “trusted” analyst didn’t account for the outpouring or rural rage against Hillary.
The Dow was plummeting, the Mexican peso crashing, and Asian markets upended, as analysts around the world began factoring the potential fallout from a Trump-style “America first” presidency.
Online, my once-sanguine Facebook friends were freaking out. People started lighting candles, chanting mantras, praying that toss-up states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could hold out.
And then the recriminations set in, with people blaming Clinton and the DNC for sabotaging Sanders, and Sanders for too stridently taking on Clinton, and, oh, what kind of twisted mess have we found ourselves in?
At 2:30 a.m., Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, mercifully told the teary-eyed Clinton camp at the Javits to go home. But the unreality of the night had yet to set in.
On CNN, analyst and former Obama aide Van Jones was near tears.
“This is a whitelash” he stated, voicing out loud the depth of racial division in America that Trump’s ascendency had revealed.
It wasn’t just white working-class voters who had bolted the Democratic Party to vote for The Donald. Trump won a majority of middle-class and wealthy whites, too.
On Wednesday morning Trump, who was booed by his fellow New Yorkers when he went to cast his ballot in Midtown, was now being feted by some exuberant traders on Wall Street.
“Lock her up!” they chanted on the floor of the Stock Exchange.
In his victory speech, Trump got on TV to assure the world he was ready to be “a president for all Americans,” even thanking Clinton, the woman he’d threatened to jail, for her decades of public service and her “very hard-fought” campaign.
Then just before midday, a surprisingly resilient-looking Clinton greeted her crestfallen supporters at the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown, urging them to accept the results with grace and resolve, instead of bitterness.
“This loss hurts,” Clinton admitted. “But please, never stop believing that fighting for what is right is worth it.”
She said we “owed” Trump an “open mind, and the chance to lead.”
Like her running mate Tim Kaine, Clinton appeared to fight back tears as she acknowledged that her chance to make history as the first woman president had been squandered once again.
“And to all the little girls who are watching this,” she said, “never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”
Why couldn’t she have been this real, this sturdy and unvarnished and human, all throughout this polarizing campaign? Why did she early on wall herself off from the press and the public? Why did she hide her e-mails, along with those infamous Wall Street speeches, thereby allowing Trump to portray her as crooked and deceptive?
Why were so many people across the U.S. buying into Trump’s angry chauvinism, his showbiz bluster, his bigoted Birtherism, his false promise to make America “great again”?
Even my 8-year old son looked at me with fear and disbelief when he found me crumpled on the couch early Wednesday morn. Chris has hated Trump ever since he heard how his half-Latin friend got bullied by Trump-loving 10-year-olds in Upstate New York last summer. They called him a “nigger.”
“It’s gonna be O.K., Chris,” I told him, doing my best to look sure. “We’re safe. We live in New York City.”
But too much of America isn’t safe.
America’s a broken mirror, and we can’t trust our leaders anymore.
Mass protests are breaking out here and in cities across the nation, as people react to the waking reality of a scary clown in office.
There will be another “Not My President” march from Union Square to Trump Tower this Saturday, starting at noon.
