What is Election Night supposed to feel like?

RIP to the good times if there ever were any

I remember walking downstairs and — in this memory, I am five-years-old and it’s the middle-of-the-night — and rubbing my eyes and looking at our wood-paneled television in the living room. My parents are on the couch, watching the news and by their faces, I can tell they’re inhabiting the separate world of adults.

On the television was a man with a boring face and beside him was a map of the United States. The individual states were outlined, red and blue — but ugly shades of red and blue that made me think of burning plastic.

I knew there was an election happening (but of course, that meant nothing to me) and I remember asking if it was over. My father said it wasn’t. I said I wanted to stay up and see who won — my mother sent me back to bed.

There, that’s my earliest political memory. I suppose we could label the pieces of it: the year was 1996 and the boring face almost certainly belonged to a news anchor. My father was a Democrat, my mother was a Catholic who voted against abortion. The couch they sat on was hideous and the carpet wasn’t much better. But beneath those details lay a question that often pulls at me when I bring that night to mind — why did this moment mark me so deeply that it formed a voluntary memory?

That’s probably the sort of question I should ask a therapist but I’m not the sort of person who goes to a therapist. My theory is that five-year-old Alex understood the moment to be an encounter with a cultural roadmark, like the Super Bowl or New Years Eve. Those moments always stick on us, or at least they always stuck on me. I can remember every New Years Eve of my entire life. I can tell you where I was and who I kissed at midnight. I can tell you stories. And I like to hear strangers’ New Years’ Eve stories.

I also like to hear the stories of strangers’ Election Nights. A few years ago, I was drinking at a bar in Brooklyn and a woman (whom I’d never seen before) said something like this is where I was in 2016 — drinking on this barstool and after it was over, I crawled on the bar and cried. And I knew exactly what she was talking about. A few months ago, I was in Santa Monica with a gay friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who told me that he and his boyfriend wore black veils to the bar on Election Night in 2020 because they were sure Trump was getting reelected.

I cannot remember where I was for every Election Night of my entire life — I know in 1996, I was on the Delmarva peninsula. I know in 2018, I was at the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue because at that time, I was writing for Playboy and I did a piece on it. In 2016, I was also in Washington, a few blocks from the White House and I remember going into the night thinking, this is going to be fun.

I remember when Obama was elected, but who doesn’t? And before that, I can mostly remember the feeling that things were getting better on Election Night, that (and pardon the hopey-changeyness) democracy was succeeding on the most basic level, which is to say that democracy was functioning.¹

But, of course, that feeling is mostly gone now.

Gone are the stories of the fun Election Nights. And it wasn’t just this year, don’t you remember the election of 2020? For four days, we stayed inside — glued to Twitter feeds and cable news with the intensity of the desert fathers. I sat a bit dazed in my Washington apartment, caught in Schrödinger's mind-fuck² — in an America in which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden (which, honestly, just meant not Donald Trump) was the president-elect.

Maybe you went to a friend’s house on Election Night 2020, maybe you bucked Covid. But if you did, and if you got drunk, you got drunk with a bit of a let-Rome-burn mentality. There was no hope in that bottle of wine you brought to the small party — the label probably said something like Apothic Red Blend, which is Ancient Greek for I have ten dollars and I need to get respectably drunk.

In an old notebook from 2020, I wrote down, his tombstone will say that he was cut into little pieces by NYT push notifications. And like everything in post-Trump politics, that may be funny but it’s not fun.

Fuck, you want fun? The New York Times advised stressed-out Election Night celebrants last Tuesday to “plunge your face into a bowl with ice water for 15 to 30 seconds.” There’s your fun. It’s Election Night in America — plunge your face into the ice-water bowl and scream.

Maybe Election Night was never fun. But I’ve seen pictures of people dancing at parties. I remember sitting in a friend’s living room in college, watching the results come in and having no urge to plunge my face into the ice-water bowl. There was pizza and dark beer and people talked too much but everybody seemed to be having fun.

And I’m sure I didn’t fabricate the memory of walking downstairs in 1996 and seeing the ugly colors of the states beside the boring face on our television screen. I know that happened. But maybe I fabricated the general feeling — maybe I saw Election Night and I believed in an emotion before I ever experienced it, which is something that happened to me too often.

On Tuesday night — the night of the 2022 election — we didn’t go to a watch party. We could have, we were on the guest list for a few of them. But we didn’t go because we have a ten-month-old son with an excessive bedtime routine and because, honestly, we didn’t want to go to a party. I sat on the couch reading Edith Glossman’s translation of Don Quixote, lost in those 400-year-old meadows under the blue Spanish sky.

And after a slight internal struggle, I checked Twitter and the New York Times’ website and when I saw that the worst of the candidates, the true pieces-of-shit like Bolduc in New Hampshire and Steve Masters in Arizona, were losing I let out a breath I’d been holding in for a few weeks. And then I put down Cervantes, walked across the room and dumped out my bowl of ice water.

1. I am well aware of the privilege afforded to me, a white man who has always been able to watch Election Night coverage with levity as if it were New Years Eve or the Super Bowl. But that privilege deserves a deeper reflection, and one which I’m unable to produce in a footnote.

2. I will admit that it’s lazy writing to ever let Schrödinger's cat loose into a piece; however I believe it works in this case if we remember that Schrödinger didn’t simply say “oh no, I put a cat in a box with poison and maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s alive — who’s to say?”

No, Schrödinger said “I’ve put a cat in a box with poison and he is both dead and alive.” And that’s far more intellectually satisfying and in this case applicable — for those four days in 2020, it felt like we lived in a world in which both Biden and Trump were the president.