Just before 11 P.M. on a dreary Tuesday night, in Tallahassee, Andrew Gillum, the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida and the erstwhile hope of progressives across the country, took to the stage in front of Lee Hall, at Florida A. & M. University. The foreboding cloud cover mirrored the mood on the campus, where both Gillum, who is the mayor of Tallahassee, and his wife, R. Jai, had matriculated. Throughout his upstart campaign, in which he improbably defeated two better-established rivals in the primary to gain the nomination, Gillum has salted his speeches with references to his grandmother. This night was no different. When he went to school in the mornings, he told his supporters, his grandmother told him to pay attention to the lesson, so that he could bring it home with him. He’d told that story so often that “Bring It Home” had become a campaign slogan. In the earlier, more optimistic stretches of the evening, people who had gathered in front of a giant screen that had been set up on the campus chanted the phrase as they watched returns from pro-Gillum precincts roll in. But on Tuesday Gillum added a melancholy postscript to the story. “I sincerely regret that I couldn’t bring it home for you,” he said, as his wife, his lieutenant-governor running mate, Chris King, and King’s wife, Kristen, stood beside him.

Gillum’s defeat came in contrast to the most recent polls, which showed him with a slight lead. Florida’s habitually close elections gave reason to believe that a Democratic win was possible. Despite a recent increase in Donald Trump’s approval rating in Florida, he remains underwater in the state. Gillum supported criminal-justice reform in an election that also saw a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to former felons who have served their time with the support of two-thirds of voters. (More than a million Floridians will have their voting rights restored.) He favored gun-reform legislation in a state where seventeen students and staff members were fatally shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland; and where, just four days before the election, a self-proclaimed misogynist shot six women, two of them fatally, and one man, in a Tallahassee yoga studio. The campaign also had a war chest worthy of a major campaign. The tall, sharp mayor with a plainspoken charm had garnered the attention—and the donations—of supporters from across the country.

Gillum’s progressive inclinations also made him part of a larger national debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. The progressive wing cited his unanticipated win in the primaries as evidence of the waning appeal of centrism. That seemed to translate into a level of voter enthusiasm that favored the Democratic ticket in Florida. At precincts around Tallahassee, young people and first-time voters streamed to the polls. At Bethel A.M.E. Church, a low-slung brick building on West Orange Avenue, people ducked through the rain in clusters of three or four to cast their ballots. Early voting numbers had surged across the state, but particularly in the Democratic bastions of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties.

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There were other motivators. In an election that was widely seen as a referendum on the President, the Republican nominee, Ron DeSantis, a forty-year-old former congressman, is a strong Trump supporter, and his campaign conjured echoes of Trump’s incendiary bigotry. DeSantis gave speeches at a conference organized by David Horowitz, who has said that the “only serious race war” in America is against white people. DeSantis’s warning to voters not to “monkey this up” was understood as an attempt to race-bait Gillum, though he denied it. Bizarre robo-calls using stereotypical slave dialect were made on DeSantis’s behalf, which he was forced to disavow.

The first sign of trouble came literally over the horizon early in the evening. The sky opened and torrents of rain, punctuated by claps of thunder, fell in Tallahassee just in time to drench the after-work crowd, dampening both the ground and voter enthusiasm. The weather was particularly ominous for Gillum, whose campaign depended on strongholds like Tallahassee and Miami-Dade County to offset the tally in the disperse rural areas where DeSantis was expected to do well. Earlier in the day, Kristen Clarke, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, reported that her organization had received reports of voting machines not working and of some voters being turned away. By noon, the office had received some five hundred complaints. Yet the election proved to be a game of turnout. Gillum suggested as much in his concession speech, when he said, “We may not have not all shown up in the way that we thought and hoped that we would, but I still believe that there are more of us who believe in what is common, and what is decent, and what is right.”

The results of the election—assuming that DeSantis’s fifty-five-thousand-vote margin holds up after the absentee ballots are counted—throw many assumptions into flux. Democrats saw progressives like Gillum and Beto O’Rourke, in Texas, lose in close races. They also saw Claire McCaskill, a definitive centrist, lose her Senate race in Missouri. The debate about which direction the Party should pursue will likely continue. Donald Trump orchestrated a campaign of fearmongering in the final run-up to the elections, one that coincided with the mass shooting in Tallahassee as well as a murderous hate crime in Pittsburgh, a racist shooting in Kentucky, and a series of attempted bombings, yet Republican voters in many places remained undeterred. One consequence is that the larger Republican majority in the Senate will almost certainly insulate him from anything that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, finds in his probe, even if the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives finds impeachable offenses there.

The Trump enigma has been whether his racist, sexist, belligerent nationalism represents an emerging nationwide political tendency, or whether he is a sui generis figure who is able to exist outside the norms of American politics, even as his most ardent allies in government must at least nominally remain inside them. Last night’s results suggest the former.

In the longer term, the presence of a Republican governor in Florida will be a boon to the Republican nominee—presumably, Trump—in seeking Florida’s twenty-nine Electoral College votes in 2020. Elections are overseen by the secretary of state, who serves at the pleasure of the governor. Most acutely, the results mean that the idealistic, upbeat candidacy of the man who would have been Florida’s first black governor foundered on the shoals of division and racism. As Tuesday night wore on, more than one person suggested to me that November 6, 2018, had begun to feel a lot like November 8, 2016. Gillum, who is just thirty-nine, attempted to buoy his supporters’ spirits. “I am not going anywhere,” Gillum promised them. He would, he said, continue to fight on their behalf. The students and the volunteers on the A. & M. campus, standing in the rain, cheered his resolve, even as they conceded that they would have to witness history being made on another night.