Opinion: How election night went from the Super Bowl of politics to the World Series

For political junkies like me, presidential election night packs the excitement of the Super Bowl and the World Series into one electrifying contest.

In the old days (circa 2012), you could usually go to sleep around midnight and still know who won the quadrennial election for the leader of the free world. Just like the Super Bowl, it was one night – about three hours of viewing – with one euphoric winner and one dejected loser emerging.

But now, due to a variety of factors – the polarization of the country and the prevalence of voting by mail being the leading ones – we likely won’t know the winner for as long as a week, about the length of the recent Yankees-Dodgers World Series.

Like the Fall Classic, this tilt will no doubt have twists and turns that will keep voters, journalists, pundits and the rest of the world on the edge of their seats each day.

Ratings for television networks like Fox News, MSNBC and CNN will skyrocket during this uncertain period and the temperature of the electorate in our country, already sending the mercury rising, could ratchet up to five-alarm-fire hot.

For me, each Election Day has had distinct and memorable moments.

In 1980, as a senior in high school, I worked on Election Day in the polling unit of NBC News, taking in exit data from correspondents around the country. That’s how the networks used to gauge who was ahead right when voting ended and project a winner in each state over a rolling three-hour period from 9 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

That day, the steady stream of results reported over the phone heavily favored Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, whom I feared – even at that politically naive age – would be disastrous for our country. While perhaps not as inept as some of his GOP successors (a low bar indeed), I still believe that income inequality, the decline of unions, the withering of the middle class, our regressive tax structure and many other societal ills originated during Reagan’s two terms.

In 1988, I was just a few years into my journalism career. The night George H.W. Bush walloped Michael Dukakis was disappointing – but not as crushing as Reagan’s romp eight years earlier. 

Bush, the patrician scion from Connecticut (and later Texas), seemed like a tamer version of Reagan. Bush proved completely feckless on the economy and began the disastrous foreign policy blunders in the Middle East that plague us to this day.

On Election Day 1992, the sun seemed to finally rise again, with two handsome, vibrant, young Democratic Southerners ousting Bush and his gaffe-prone sidekick, Dan Quayle. It had been 16 years since the last Democratic presidential victory, when Jimmy Carter, the little-known peanut farmer, notched an unexpected victory over Gerald Ford, the accidental president who became a weekly punchline due to his portrayal by Chevy Chase on the then-new comedy show, “Saturday Night Live” (now in its 50th season).

Clinton’s victory in 1992 and easy reelection in 1996 came amid a booming economy thanks to the tech revolution breaking out all over the West Coast – from Seattle to San Francisco. Charging into the new millennium, the U.S. felt like it was on the cusp of an ever-expanding global hegemony, especially in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, our longtime Cold War adversary, and before the awakening of the sleeping economic giants China and India.

In 2000, we had a painful foreshadowing of the rancorous division still playing out almost a quarter-century later. The outcome of the Bush/Gore race was much more dramatic than a World Series slugfest. To mix a few sports metaphors, it felt like a heavyweight boxing match that went into overtime, with both fighters bloodied, weary and incapable of conceding – until the Supreme Court, like a prizefight referee, decided to raise the arm of Republican nominee George W. Bush and declare a much-disputed technical knockout. 

And thus began our electoral troubles in America.

In 2004, after a hapless four years of Bush Junior’s leadership, reelection night became a nail-biter – until the bellwether state of Ohio tipped the scales to Bush once again and Democratic nominee John Kerry was swift-boated to defeat.

After a long day of knocking on doors in Allentown, I came home to watch election night results and jumped for joy when Pennsylvania was declared for Kerry. But a few hours later, when Ohio was finally decided, I kicked myself for not taking the bus a few hours longer to canvass in the Buckeye State.

In 2008, “Yes we can” became “the change we could believe in.” I remember going to the hospital for minor surgery on election morning, later dragging myself to the voting booth, spending the rest of the day in bed recuperating and then beaming with joy when I watched Barack Obama speak to throngs of supporters in his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago later that glorious night.

The fears of the looming economic Armageddon were forgotten for one night while much of America rejoiced in the election of our first Black President, having seemingly transcended the country’s original sin of racism and slavery. The words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards Justice” – reverberated in my ears for the next few weeks.

In 2012, Obama easily defeated his uber-wealthy GOP challenger, Mitt Romney, a man who today looks heroic as one of the few remaining courageous politicians in the MAGA-occupied Republican Party. His honest, moderate wing of the party – which also includes former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – will hopefully return when MAGA fever abates, preferably one day very soon.

In 2016, Democrats were cocky, but I warned those around me not to underestimate the possibility of Trump’s triumph. I had been to the GOP convention in Cleveland, covering it as a political columnist, and I saw the fervor for the faux-populist candidate who hailed from the gilded tower on Fifth Avenue. 

By 2 a.m. post-election morning (or was it mourning?), the result was clear: enough of America was more comfortable with an inexperienced, ethnocentric, alleged sexual assaulter leading the land than an eminently qualified woman who had been on the international stage for more than two decades and had extensive government experience.

I woke up that day at 6:30 a.m., with two of my then-teenage daughters piling in to our bed, distraught at the shocking result. “Don’t worry, our country will survive the next four years,” I told them, with a crack in my voice and a lump in my throat.

Three years later, a deadly viral pathogen made its way to our shores while the protector-in-chief was in denial and using bluster rather than science to figure out how to minimize the damage. Within two years, more than 1 million Americans were dead, with many millions more like me left to deal with the lingering effects of COVID-19. Trump whiffed on the one true emergency he faced, like a Little Leaguer missing a curveball by a mile.

So when 2020’s election night rolled in, a scarred country of Democrats watched and prayed that Joe Biden, an old, steady hand from the Democratic establishment, could sweep away the MAGA wave and retire Trumpism for posterity. It didn’t happen that night, but 96 hours later, spontaneous clapping and shouts of joy filled the streets of my neighborhood in Brooklyn – and throughout bluer parts of the country –  when the winner was finally announced.

But with a botched evacuation of Afghanistan, crushing inflation numbers and a general unease around the country, the door was opened yet again for the twice-impeached insurrection-inciter – who now faces 34 counts of criminal charges as well as a plethora of civil lawsuits, including a few that he lost the past two years.

Like the coronavirus, Trump refused to go away, and here we are – again – facing a tense, toss-up election tonight.

COVID changed the calculus of election night forever. In 2020, over 100 million Americans voted by mail rather than going to their local polling site on Election Day. Many of these ballots were not counted until after Election Day, delaying the announcement of a clear winner. It took nearly four days in 2020 for Joe Biden to be declared the next president.

This year has seen another surge in mail-in voting. Even many Republicans skeptical of the practice in 2020 have since come around. That means we are likely facing a tense evening – and probably a series of tenser days and nights – of fretting over swing states within a knife’s edge of tipping the race toward either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Here’s one sure-fire prediction: no matter what the result tonight (or maybe in four to seven days), almost half of our country will be incensed and possibly even violent. November may have come in like a lamb, but it will turn into a lion within a week.

Things could drag on for quite a while – for a few days, like in 2020, more than a day, like in 1960, or over a month, like in 2000. All we can do is hope that the loser of the Electoral College acts like Richard Nixon six decades ago/ or Al Gore at the turn of the century. 

Each could have contested the razor-thin results in court (Nixon lost by 0.2%, or 112,000 votes out of 68 million cast; Gore lost Florida – and the election – by 537 votes after the Supreme Court put their overweighted thumbs on the scale for Bush), but each chose country over party and self – a hallowed tradition that stretches all the way back to George Washington declining impassioned entreaties to continue leading the nation so it could move forward without him for the greater good.

Hoping for a return to post-election normalcy, I find myself paraphrasing the best song ever to include a World Series winner: “Where have you gone, Al Gore? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”