It becomes very clear, shortly after Donald Trump wins Georgia, that I have made a terrible mistake. I’m sitting at home on my couch, but I’m looking around at a giant convention hall that is filled with a loud, eclectic array of human-animal hybrids—most of them with childrens’ voices. The news of Trump’s clinching of a battleground state—and his now increasingly inexorable slide into the US presidency—has just been presented to us by a cross-legged skeleton who says he is from the UK. He’s just here to hang out with the Americans on their big day.

This scenario, as you may have guessed, is not taking place in the real world, but a VR realm. I have made the unenviable decision to follow one of the most important elections of our time from one of the most absurd places possible—deep in the metaverse.

The room with the friendly Brit skeleton is in the virtual reality service VRChat. The VR platform is an open world with various rooms created by users to explore. Users create their own 3D avatar and interact with each other by huddling into groups and using voice chat. Unlike Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform that only works with Meta’s VR hardware, VRChat is more inclusive; the list of supported hardware includes Meta headsets, Steam headsets, and even PCs and phones.

I’ve logged on using a Meta Quest 3S headset and have joined several dozen other avatar-clad people to anxiously chat through the results of the 2024 US election. The room is called Election Night 2024, made by a user with the moniker AussieGuy92. Election Night 2024 is a large virtual space that can fit up to 80 people at once, and is decorated to look like a realistic convention hall of the type where a campaign might host an election night watch party. In the lobby are signs for the Trump-Vance campaign and the Harris-Walz campaign, complete with smiling pictures of each of their presidential candidates. Inside the hall is a giant screen, rows of chairs for an audience, and large maps with each state labeled with its electoral college vote numbers. Outside, you can move onto a digital model of a city bus that will teleport you to a mock-up of the White House.

Some key parts of this simulation go awry right away. First off, AussieGuy92, the user who created the space, is not even in the room most of the time, so any of the dynamic elements he could control as our host remain dormant. Despite a packed schedule of streaming videos and events listed on the walls of the building, none of that promised content is displayed on the screens inside the room. The election map doesn’t change at all throughout the night. It stays a faded gray, meaning people are on their own for gathering and sharing information about election returns. That’s why I’m grateful to the skeleton who can’t even vote in this election; he’s reading the results aloud from his phone.

“There’s a good chance he’s going to win,” the skeleton says early on in the night. “I just don’t think Kamala’s got a chance to win.”

There’s a pause, and then someone else asks, “So people who weren’t born in America gotta go back home?”

“Yeah I guess.”

The crowd in the room looks like a Second Life or Fortnite gathering that’s been mutated by some radioactive goo. I am dressed as a hot dog. My colleague Kelly Bourdet (who first introduced me to that UK skeleton) shows up in the form of a cat wearing a spacesuit. There are lots of Donald Trump look-alikes running around, lots of anime girls, and lots of knights in shiny metal armor. Batman is here being very chill. Wolverine cruises around flashing his claws at people. A giant penguin sits alone, staring into a far-off corner of the room as one fin twitches slightly. One person bulldozes through the space as an avatar that looks like a full-size, near photorealistic Taco Bell drive-through. One stomps around as a mech. Some users are pretending to kiss each other. But most of them are just arguing loudly, trolling, or using AI generated voices of Donald Trump and Joe Biden to say increasingly juvenile and, frequently, racist things.

VRChat is where all the action is in this digital space. (And by action, I mean sheer chaos.) But I am eager to swap from VRChat to Meta’s Horizon Worlds, just to see what the vibe is like there. Coming from the cacophony of VRChat, the chronically underpopulated Horizon Worlds feels almost refreshing in its serenity.

“We’re expecting a little bit of excitement tonight,” says one of Horizon’s community guides, the helpful moderators who greet users and offer advice to newcomers in Horizon’s entry world, Horizon Central.

Beyond that main foyer, Meta’s metaverse is less focused, or at least doesn’t have the user base to build up a flourishing political space. (A room in Horizon simply called Go Trump! has a grand total of zero people inside anytime I check throughout the day.) Horizon Worlds can be a lonely place on the best of days, but there are signs of life on election night as the population ebbs and flows. There are long lulls, broken up by the chattering of the occasional kid running by with a digital bubble gun. Then suddenly there’s a rush of people, many of them kids, some of them adults from other countries. Some of them bring up the election, some of them just stand there quietly.

“We’re trying to escape it, that’s why we’re here,” one user tells me.

Technology has been at the forefront of this election cycle from the start. Generative AI has driven concerns about misinformation and eye-rolling propaganda. Even the campaigns themselves embraced new-ish spaces, like the Harris-Walz-themed map in Fortnite.

The metaverse may not be quite ready for the campaign cycle, but perhaps the political system should be ready for it. For all the chaos and trolling in the room on election night, what soon becomes clear is that the vibe in VR reflects the outside world.

First off, the VR election rooms are overwhelmingly male, which will be unsurprising for anyone accustomed to the political manosphere in the US. Most of the people I encounter in both virtual realms seem to favor Trump, and that power imbalance only grows throughout the night as the red wave deepens and the former president’s reelection seems more and more likely.

My colleague Kelly talks with a person dressed in a black Iron Man-esque suit of armor who says they are from Michigan. Ersatz Iron Man calls the state for Trump much earlier than it was officially reported. They say they know lots of people who support Trump, and for whom Elon Musk’s endorsement and posts on X were an important factor to helping Trump win more broadly.

Lots of moments like this happen over the night. At first, the real-world results clash with the absurdity in the Horizon World rooms. People hiding within their brightly colored avatars, shouting over the top of each other, saying the most offensive things possibly to provoke a reaction. But then the room starts to split, a larger group on the Trump side—loud and excited. Then a smaller group on the Harris side, more somber and reflective. Some people congregate outside, talking in low voices and crunching the numbers about how many electoral votes are left.

“We’ll never have a girl president,” I hear a child shout during my visit to MetDonalds, Horizon Worlds’ mockup of the fast-food chain with golden arches. “We’ve got to keep our American traditions!”

“Let’s kill all the old white people in America that are around,” says somebody wearing an avatar that looks like a slinky dog from Toy Story. Then, to somebody else, “I guess if Trump wins you don’t have to worry about your school getting shot up as much I guess.”

Later I watch somebody voraciously defend Trump’s policies while a different person in a knight avatar comes around behind him and starts miming rubbing his nipples while moaning loudly over the top of him. By the end of the night, it starts to feel like the virtual world is just as weird as the real one.

Additional reporting by WIRED contributor Kelly Bourdet.