For the record and as a reminder, as of 6 a.m. this morning, it is not over and there is still hope. Whether any of us are able to actually let ourselves feel hope is of course a very personal and specific thing. As you'll see, I'm not here to recommend one or the other. We have all bought our ticket, and we must now finish the ride in our own ways.
Regarding hope and the advisability of feeling it: It would be a relief to hear that Pennsylvania has been called for Biden, but apparently he has "a path" even if that state goes the other way.
Per the Times this morning, because of Nebraska's non-winner-takes-all approach to awarding electoral college votes, Biden's "pick up of a single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District ... opens a potential pathway for Mr. Biden to the presidency without winning Pennsylvania, if he carried all the states that Mrs. Clinton did, and added Michigan and Wisconsin."
If correct, this assertion is good news, but it is also a considerably more conditional basis for hope than some of us started with yesterday. We'll have to take what we can get, I suppose.
* * *
Yesterday, as Americans headed to the polls, I wasn't sure how to feel. The polls seemed unrelentingly positive for Biden, even ridiculously so. Surely the kinks had been worked out since last time? Surely it was, in fact, reasonable to believe things were going to go Democrats' way? And yet whenever I did let myself start to believe that, or quote some reassuring bit of news to Petra, there was a sort of ringing in my ears and a voice that asked if I was really going to let myself get set up for the same kind of fall as in 2016. Really?
I paced the floor. Optimistic? Pessimistic? What would it be?
Fortunately, there was a Times article to save the day. Acknowledging that many Biden supporters were spending the weeks leading up to the election willing themselves not to get their hopes up and instead actively trying to expect the worst, a psychology professor quoted in an article by opinion writer Charlie Warzel advised us that it might be okay to let ourselves feel optimistic after all.
This advice seemed based on a logic in which the goal was to achieve some net reduction in our total amount of time spent feeling bad. If you cultivate pessimism and then your worst fears come true, the argument seemed to be, you'll feel twice as punished than if you'd let yourself feel hope and then were disappointed. "Really you’ll be paying the price twice," he said. "Once for the anticipatory period and again if the results don’t go how you want."
Among the things that jumped out at me about this advice was the implicit assumption that people can choose whether to feel optimistic or pessimistic. Leaving aside whether it's better for you to have a more optimistic or a more pessimistic mindset, it's my experience that a person who goes around telling others to "think positively" is either someone for whom this comes naturally or someone who likes to pretend it does. If she is speaking to people for whom thinking positively does not come naturally, she is simply wasting her breath (just like dance instructors who tell their students to relax, or idiots who tell women they should smile more, and other inanely unhelpful utterances).
It's not that the article didn't speak to me at all. Wrote Warzel:
"Right now you probably feel like a spring that’s been tightly compressed under enormous weight. From the outside, it appears still. Inside it is coursing with intense potential (anxious!) energy just dying for release."
Well, yes, and get out of my head. There have certainly seemed to be endless reasons for anxiety over the last couple of months. As just one example of the kind of catastrophizing I've been doing concerning the many things that seemed likely to go wrong, for weeks I had been imagining Russian military intelligence standing by with hands on the switches of what I had started thinking of as "confusion bombs," or election hacking attempts that wouldn't even need to be "successful" to succeed. In other words, Putin's agents wouldn't have to actually change election results, they would just need to appear to have been able to.
Then, if the race were close enough that there seemed to be no clear popular mandate for Biden or repudiation of Trump, and if just enough uncertainty could be injected into the public's (and, I suppose, the Supreme Court's) perception of the integrity of enough of a crucial state's ballots...
Well, this feels a little too close to where we actually are, so I'll leave that line of reasoning alone for now.
Suffice to say, I swung back and forth between optimism and pessimism all day long.
I'm here to tell Mr. Warzel that I did not seem to have any choice in the matter.
* * *
Another bit of advice in Warzel's article was "don't cancel, schedule." No, this wasn't a line in the sand regarding "cancel culture" (this was the Times, after all) but rather a recommendation not to clear our schedules this week. "If you have nothing to do you’ll only revert to worrying and obsessively consuming news,” said a doctor quoted by Warzel. "Volunteer, start a craft project, cook, do something that reminds you that life will go on."
This advice seemed to address what to do in the weeks leading up Election Day, not how to get through the day itself. Still, it came to mind when Petra mused aloud about whether we should invite any neighbors to come visit with us by our fire pit in the evening.
Socializing didn't seem to appeal to either of us all that much, but in the end we did it anyway. I figured connecting with friends while sipping bourbon would be one reasonably healthy way to get through the last dead hours of waiting and reach that moment, around 9 p.m., when--if things ended up going about as well as possible for Biden--we might see early signs in a victory in Florida or maybe North Carolina.
I sent out the following text around 5 p.m.:
"If you feel like getting drunk around our firepit for the next few hours, we're game."
There were a few takers, and it was good to sit and feel hope with others--the hope that our country might be on a better path in as soon as a few hours, yes, but also the hope inherent in friendship, the knowledge that, whatever happens, there are people in our lives glad to help us carry what burdens us.
By the time we went inside, it was apparent that things were not going as well as possible for Biden. Trump had won Florida and it seemed we would be in for a long couple of days.
"Sorry we missed you," texted a neighbor, as Petra and I were putting away the kitchen for the night. "Guess three hours after the invitation was too late to drop by. Hopefully we can get together around the fire tomorrow to celebrate."
"Fingers crossed," I texted, then went to bed.
It was surprisingly easy to fall asleep (thanks, bourbon!), but my eyes snapped open at 3 a.m. and I could not get back to sleep.
Hunched over my phone in the bathroom, I saw the following Times headline:
"Election Turns Into Nail-Biter That May Extend for Days."
I canceled my subscription, then went back to bed.
