The vibes in Los Angeles tonight are abysmal. So much so that trudging across town toward the Sunset Strip during rush hour on election eve somehow doesn’t seem like the worst idea. LA has a reputation as a political bubble on most days, but I wondered if the tense nature of this particular election would manage to puncture that perception—so I headed to Tower Bar, a watering hole inside the Sunset Tower Hotel that’s a favorite of wheeler-dealers in one of the most visible places in the city.
The dark, sexy hotel bar is usually mobbed but tonight it’s relatively quiet, with a few tables here and there crowded with couples and friends clinking glasses of Pinot Noir over French fries. But around 6 p.m. Pacific time, when most polls had closed on the east coast and the election was starting to ramp up in earnest, no one in there was checking their phones, save to flash their flashlights to look more closely at the menu specials. Turns out the Old Hollywood bar—a favorite of hobnobbing kingmakers and celebrity-spotters, in the ground floor of a building where mobster Bugsy Siegel once kept a pied-à-terre—feels oddly like being there any other night, even amidst, you know, the inevitable. The bartenders stir martinis and debate whether the new Gladiator sequel will hold a candle to the original. As the nightly pianist and double bass players thrum their respective instruments in the loungey bar, it feels like the Titanic gradually submerging itself into subzero temperatures as the band improbably plays on.
Across the street at the rootin’, tootin’ tourist haunt Saddle Ranch Chop House, things aren’t much better: The few people riding the resident mechanical bull do so like they’re yee-hawing more out of obligation, not so much out of joy. But this tracks with what I see from most of the people I meet on the Strip tonight, many of whom seem to be disassociating with a generous shrug. A few people I chat with at Tower Bar are Europeans who happen to be vacationing here during this consequential and dystopian week, including an affable German man who’s here for the express purpose of riding his Harley-Davidson chopper up the Pacific Coast Highway. At least the U S of A still holds a semblance of a promise for someone.
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