Democrats dare to believe as US votes

HERE THEY WERE AGAIN, going through the dread and the angst for the third time in eight years.

- Jonathan Freedland

It has come to feel like a quadrennial appointment with destiny, as Democrats approach the November day when their chosen champion once more comes face to face with the man they, and much of the watching world, both loathe and fear: Donald Trump.

This time, the polls pointed to an even tighter contest than the last two in 2016 and 2020, even though each of those were ultimately determined by fewer than 100,000 votes in a handful of states. Final surveys and data analyses showed the race as a statistical dead heat.

One highly sophisticated model ran 80,000 simulations and found that Kamala Harris won 40,012 of them, a result that could scarcely be more finely balanced. None of which eased Democratic nerves.

In a way, all this was the legacy of the trauma of 2016, when Democrats felt sure that they were about to see Hillary Clinton anointed as America's first female president only to watch as the numbers fell the other way. Rather than being healed by victory four years later, the trauma was reinforced by the way an eightpoint final poll lead for Joe Biden melted away on the night and it took days of counting and a series of razor thin margins in the crucial states to name him the winner.

It made Democrats distrustful of polls, but also glumly apprehensive that Trump has a knack for doing better than expected.

And yet, many Democrats went into election night allowing themselves to feel the faint stirrings of an unfamiliar feeling.