It’s usually bad form for journalists to interview other journalists while on the job, but I was curious. I’d just left Union Pub, the famous DC bar always chock-full of Hill staffers, and bumped into a guy who worked for the local radio. I asked him what he’d made of the night – what he felt the vibe was – and he told me, after thinking for a while, that he couldn’t really say.
He’d been to three different bars but still, the mood was… eh. It was both a disappointing conversation and a reassuring one. I’d reached the end of what should have been a very eventful evening but just couldn’t picture the shape of the piece I wanted to write. “I spent election night going from bar to bar in DC” is a simple premise; “this is what it felt like” is, it turns out, a much fiddlier exercise altogether.
Oh, and it’d all started so well. My first stop was at Busboys and Poets and, after queuing for a while at 6pm, I was given a map of US states, a box of crayons, and a spot at the bar. There were screens everywhere and, though nothing had been announced yet, you could tell that people were keeping an eye on the news.
The woman to my right, however, had her back turned away from the screen. “I’m worried I’m going to have a panic attack otherwise”, she told me; she only planned to start paying attention from around 8pm onward. The young man to my left was more engaging – a pleasant wonk, fresh from university and now working in politics.
His friends in the Harris campaign were “nauseously optimistic” and so was he, he told me. He was glad they were positive but not showing quite as much bravado as Clinton’s people did back in 2016. Still, it was hard not to be superstitious. Kamala finished her campaign with a gig in Pennsylvania, and wasn’t that exactly what Hillary had done? Was it a bad omen? Was it mad to wonder if it was?
He left shortly afterwards, and I headed to my next stop. Wunder Garden, down the road, was giant and mostly jolly. Every blue state or senator was welcomed with loud cheers; all their red equivalents were booed.
Though the enthusiasm was welcome, it wasn’t always well-informed; the room erupted in applause when Florida voted in favour of enshrining abortion rights by 57%. The magic number needed for it to pass was actually 60%, meaning it had failed.
My third and last stop was at Union Pub. By that point, it’d become clear that the overall picture was, at best, muddy. People drank and looked at the screens and, mostly, I ended up speaking to a number of foreigners, all of whom complained that counting votes never took quite as long in their country. The whole thing felt like tipsy torture.
Temporary entertainment was provided by the staff informing us that we’d collectively won “the 270 challenge” at 10.45pm. Punters had managed to buy over 270 themed blue or red drinks – the recipes being “vodka and blue stuff” or “vodka and red stuff” – and so everyone got to have a shot on the house. The entire thing made me feel around 50 years older than I actually am.
Crucially, we still had no idea what was going to happen. Things weren’t looking great for the Democrats and, though it neared midnight, we couldn’t tell if we were watching a repeat of 2016 or 2020. It was, somehow, agonising, hypnotising and tedious at the same time.
As I entered my sixth hour of bar hopping, I realised it was time to call it a day. I decided to walk the 45 minutes back to the flat and, on my way there, stopped to gawp at the Capitol, all gleaming and white against the empty dark sky. I thought it was a metaphor for something, and a fitting end to the night, but I couldn’t quite put any of it into words.
In the end, I needn’t have worried. Around half a mile later – only about ten blocks down from all those bars – I saw a group of men gathered outside a supermarket. I asked them what they were doing, and they explained that they’d been asked to board it up, in the middle of the night.
This, as a vignette, felt more important than any of the themed cocktails I’d been offered all evening. America was falling apart, and all we’d done was getting drunk as Rome prepared to burn.
