Nearly every result that comes in – from counties to states, marginals to strongholds – shows the same pattern: Kamala Harris performing slightly worse than Joe Biden in 2020. Donald Trump performing slightly better than he did in 2020. Two per cent here, three per cent there. A couple thousand votes here and a couple thousand there. Tiny margins. But in a race defined by tiny margins, it makes all the difference. Tiny margins are where the victory takes place.

Nearly every hour, the pathways to victory for Harris have got narrower and narrower. The maths harder and harder. And it becomes harder to fight the sense of horror and despair.

We’ve been here before. 2020 started ugly and then improved, as Democrat votes came in through the early morning. But things were different then. There were basic statistical reasons to keep your hopes up. There were more mail-in ballots to come, which favoured Democrats. This time, the reasons for optimism have largely faded. Most remaining sources of hope have gone. That’s the grim, decaying truth of it. Hope is dying out there. It’s dying in the margins.

You watch it with a pit in your stomach. A dank, pitch black hole where your constitution used to be. That old painful anxiety grasping at your heart, the unmistakable taste of despair in your mouth.

It’s hard to summon up the kind of empathy which explains why someone votes for Trump. It’s hard to conceive of how someone could hear him talk about eugenics, could watch him slip into violent fantasies, could see this representation of all the most selfish and childlike instincts in the human personality and think: yeah, I want more of that.

But that, of course, is what will happen now. There will be long post-mortems to follow. Did Joe Biden cling on too long, derailing the possibilities of the Harris campaign? Did his late stage contributions undermine her? Did she lack a clear retail offer, making the campaign about the evils of her opponent rather than the things she would improve in people’s lives? Were Democrats wrong to focus so strongly on abortion, which clearly did not motivate voters to the extent they imagined?

The most compelling explanation is simply this: incumbents are punished in 2024. This is not the sum total of the analysis, but it is the starting place and the necessary condition of it. Around the world, we’re seeing the long-tail impact of inflation. It hammered the Tories in the UK. It tortured governing parties in the European parliamentary elections. It took away Narendra Modi’s majority in India. It did the same to the ANC in South Africa.

From a British perspective, it’s hard to feel too sympathetic about American complaints over inflation. They have economic growth at a scale that we can only dream about. Their pay packets are much higher than ours. Unemployment was low. Inflation was nowhere near as bad as what we got here. But this is not how people view things. They assess their lives by whether they can afford a new car, can go on a nice holiday. And when that is not the case, they are primed to punish people in power.

Terrible things will now happen. There’s no point dressing it up, or pretending it’ll be better than it is. We are in serious trouble. We are in a moment of acute danger, the likes of which we’ve never really seen before.

Ukraine is now in terrible danger, the worst since the invasion. Perhaps Europe can hold out with its financial and military support, but it is hard to imagine how long that can maintain without American backing. Trump will try to force it to hand over territory on peace terms that he essentially dictates.

Vladmir Putin will consider himself vindicated. He has his man in the White House again. And with him in place, there is nothing to stop him from moving more forcefully against new targets, as he has already begun to do in recent weeks in Georgia and Moldova.

Across the world, the worst people will be galvanised. Viktor Orban in Hungary. Marine Le Pen in France. Georgia Meloni in Italy. Nigel Farage in Britain. They will feel as if they are once again riding the wave of history. They will have a spring in their step and a sense of momentum to their actions.

They will bray and they will laugh and they will tell us that “the elites” will now get their comeuppance. But it is not the elites who are punished when people like Trump get in power. It’s those who need protections and are denied it. Ukrainians, fighting for their freedom with their lives. Immigrants without documentation, wondering if they will be locked up and expelled. Women who need an abortion, and will instead be forced to give birth to a child they did not want, as the government tells them what they may and may not do with their body.

If Trump wins, we will be in a state of despair for some time. There’s no point denying that. But afterwards, we will need to do more, in our own country and overseas, to defend those who will be targeted by the global populist movement, from the streets of Kyiv to the borders of America.

That is the only sensible thing that can be said in the circumstances. It’s the best that we can aim for, on one of the darkest mornings we’ve woken up to.