Marketplace of Ideas Blog

We have arrived, finally, at Election Day. The work of thousands of people over hundreds of days for hundreds of candidates throughout Wisconsin, not to mention the rest of the country, pays off, or not, after 8 tonight.

As somewhat of a political junkie (they say the first step toward recovering from an addiction is admitting your addiction), election night was a thrill, or at least it was. (The reasons why it has become less of a thrill will become evident shortly.) Every two years, I’ve been parked in front of the TV until at least midnight, watching winners and losers, their supporters, political experts, reporters with various degrees of live TV skills, and anchors with various degrees of live improvisational skills. If you have no vested interest in the results (i.e. you have no kids and you don’t own anything beyond your car), it’s great drama. (Wow! Look at those Town of Empire Board results!)

Being three years old at the time, I don’t recall the crazy 1968 election, which included, in order, a near-upset that made the incumbent decide to pull out of the race, the assassination of one of the candidates, a candidate who said the media wouldn’t have him “to kick around anymore” winning his party’s nomination, a governor from one party starting a third-party candidacy and winning electoral votes, a full-scale riot at one of the national conventions, suspected skulduggery in negotiations to end a war by forces for one of the candidates, and the winner of the election receiving all of 43 percent of the vote. The first election I remember was the 1972 presidential election, where Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide proved so effective for Republicans that the GOP gained all of 12 seats in the House of Representatives and lost two Senate seats. (That turned out to be the high point of Nixon’s second term in office.)

The 1972 election was of interest in my neighborhood because of a rumor that Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern was going to make children go to school on Saturdays if elected. Irrespective of the fact that (1) there was no actual evidence to support the rumor and (2) those of us in second grade at Kennedy Elementary School in Madison were a decade away from being eligible to vote, all of us believed that Nixon was the one.

Four years later, despite my efforts for the Gerald Ford–Bob Dole ticket at Schenk Middle School in Madison (a class project was to create campaign posters for the two tickets; if I remember correctly, the boys in my class were for Ford and the girls were for Jimmy Carter), Ford lost. Or, more accurately, the country lost by a majority of voters picking Carter, but that paved the way for what happened next.

Four years later came the intensely-interesting-to-watch race among Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and former Illinois Rep. John Anderson (remember him?). I was ready to stay up all night if necessary to see the results, because the pundits all said the race was far too close to call. And it was, until 7:15 p.m., when NBC projected Reagan’s win, accompanied by, as depicted on a giant U.S. map with Republican blue (not red) all over it, the defeat of numerous incumbent Democratic U.S. senators, including Wisconsin’s own Gaylord Nelson — a defeat that absolutely no one saw coming. (Shades of six years later, when Wisconsin’s political experts saw no way that Democratic Gov. Anthony Earl, despite a Carter-like four years in office, could possibly lose to Assembly Minority Leader Tommy Thompson … until Earl lost.)

By 1984, I was old enough to not only vote, but participate in the political process. My first presidential vote was at my aforementioned grade school for a Democrat, the candidate I felt best qualified to run for president on the Democratic side in 1984: None of the Above. (That year was, I believe, the one and only time a None-of-the-Above option was available on either party’s primary ballot.)

I spent much of the summer and fall doing campaign work for my state representative who was running for state Senate. You may have heard of him: Chuck Chvala. (Yes, the same senator I kept calling “It’s Been the Rich vs. the Rest of Us” Chvala when I arrived here the first time.) In 1984, Chvala was a state representative, a graduate of my high school (his father taught at La Follette and was the Fighting Bobs’ hockey coach), and a pleasant, seemingly politically moderate person with two little kids who just before his campaign started suffered a horrible tragedy — his then-wife was severely injured in a crash on the treacherous old South Beltline in Madison.

Chvala’s election night party was at a Madison hotel. There was, I think, only one person in the entire party who was 100 percent satisfied with the election results, having supported the winner in the presidential, state Senate and state Assembly races (the eventual winner, a county supervisor, survived a crowded Democratic primary to get to election night). But given that the crowd was mostly Democratic, I refrained from public self-congratulation while drinking my beer.

By 1988, I had gone from working on campaigns to covering them as a weekly newspaper reporter. Interviewing various candidates for state and federal office as they came past our front door was very interesting. That fall, I learned a bizarre law of politics in the Third Congressional District’s Democratic primary, when an Arcadia Democrat named James Ziegeweid, who conducted a campaign that seemed sufficient to get the nomination, lost to the other candidate on the ballot, a guy named Karl Krueger, who had never bothered to appear in the southern end of the district (i.e. our newspaper).

Krueger told me later that the reason he won was because of his last name — Krueger was a fine German name, Ziegeweid was an unfamiliar name, and if voters don’t know either candidate, he said, they’ll go for the familiar name. (Perhaps that explains my Ripon School Board loss and predicts my chances of getting elected to anything in the future.)

That election night taught me the reality of The Last Precinct, as well. Since our newspaper was in the county seat (in fact, across the street from the courthouse), I reasoned that we should have every result from each of the county’s 68 precincts in the paper, which went to press the afternoon after Election Day. So, starting about 9 p.m., I periodically visited the county clerk’s office as election results slowly came in. Every time a group came in, I noted them and then called them in to Associated Press, which paid me something like $40 for my work.

By midnight, there were four precincts left, all townships with more cows than people. The clerk’s office workers, some of whom were shaking from, I assumed, far too much coffee consumption over the day, waited … and waited … and waited, before the workers decided they’d had enough and decided to go home. The young reporter, incensed that town polling place workers would believe the public’s right to know their results was not as important as their sleep, got the phone numbers of the clerks and called The Last Precincts at 12:45 a.m., getting not very pleasant greetings in return.

Four years later, Election Day 1992 was the day my wife and I got back from our Mexico honeymoon, arriving at our house around 3 a.m. Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in the office of the newspaper we owned, trying to get my fatigue-fogged brain to function to write about the results of the parts of three counties our newspaper covered, results about which, you can imagine, I was unenthusiastic.

Four years later, I was here at Marketplace. That night, I went to the parties of the two Eighth Congressional District candidates — TV-anchor-turned-Democratic candidate Jay Johnson, who when I left had the giddiness of someone about to win who perhaps didn’t expect to, and Republican candidate David Prosser, then speaker of the Assembly, who had the precise opposite reaction. Other than the hors d’oeuvres and drinks, plus the sight of seeing Johnson’s dog at his party, it was not a night I remembered fondly.

Few sights are as sad as the supporters of a losing candidate on election night — people who have had all of their free time gobbled up to work for a candidate they believe in — parades, door-to-door leafletting, phone calls, etc. — only to see that candidate rejected by the voters. In 2002, Gov. Scott McCallum gave a melancholy speech to his supporters, noting Republican successes in legislative races, lauding his workers’ and volunteers’ work — “Jim Doyle will see that the strength of this state is the people, who go to church, help coach, get involved,” he said — and saying that he thought his campaign was right on the issues, meaning “the only reason we would lose was the candidate.” One has to feel compassion even for supporters of candidates on the bottom of landslides; at Chvala’s victory party I noticed a teacher at my high school watching Walter Mondale’s concession speech with tears in his eyes.

Then came 2000 and the month-long election night, the weirdest political thing I will probably ever see in my entire life. (The personal irony was that as a freshman in college I wrote a political science term paper, advocating, yes, the abolition of the Electoral College.) On my way home from work, Florida had been announced as a Gore win (while polls in the Florida Panhandle, which is on Central time, were still open), only to have the networks pull their projection. The experts knew the George W. Bush vs. Al Gore race was going to be close, and that was apparent as I did live commentary on the Ripon radio station, commentary that had to end by midnight because my wife was going on ambulance call at midnight, so I had to be home in case she was paged out for a call. I stayed up as well with my son, who was ill, and I paced, child in my arms, back and forth in front of the TV while NBC decided whether Florida was going for Bush or Gore.

(Recall the late Tim Russert’s whiteboard with “Florida! Florida! Florida!” written on it:

I said the same thing on radio, based on my quick calculations that Florida’s 25 electoral votes would be enough to push Bush over the 270-electoral-vote total, but then again I didn’t work for NBC.)

About 1:15, CNN finally announced that Florida had gone to Bush:

I put Michael to bed, watched for a while longer, then went to the kitchen to clean it up. For some reason, at 2:30 I turned the TV back on, heard Tom Brokaw announce that the projected vote totals in Florida were diminishing, thought that was just too crazy to be true, and turned off the TV. About 4:30, Jannan, Michael and I were in the emergency room across the street because Michael was having trouble breathing; the emergency room doctor concluded that Michael had … a cold. I went to work after a grand total of 90 minutes of sleep.

Of course, as we all know, that didn’t end the election. At the time, I was appearing on the former Wisconsin Public Television “WeekEnd” show as their non-liberal non-Madisonian commentator. The biannual “WeekEnd Election Hangover Show” was held a couple of Fridays later, and one of the panelists was planning on retiring from the show after the election, but, as he pointed out, one can’t retire after an election if the election refuses to end.

In the month after the 2000 election, I would send emails every couple of days to a group of Marketplace readers, passing on news from the post-election count in Florida and making predictions, all of which were (I thought) well-reasoned, and all of which were wrong. As the Dec. 5, 2000 issue came up (that issue’s Between Issues election story, the headline of which “Election winners: Kohl, Green, Petri and Bush?”, noted that Shawano voters, by an 18-vote margin, rejected a referendum to add fluoride to the city’s water supply), I had to decide what to write about an election that may or may not have ended by the time readers got that issue.

My solution: Write a multiple-choice column. The left-side column began with “If Gore wins, read this …”, the right-side column began with “If Bush wins, read this …” and the middle column began with “… and then read this.” (My conclusion: “This election will be invoked for years to demonstrate that, yes, your vote does count. But this election also will be invoked for at least the near future by those who claim, for the right (voting methods) and wrong (because they didn’t like the result) reasons, that our system is in trouble. Millions of Americans went about their lives paying attention, even deep attention, to As the Votes Turn, while remembering that their lives continue regardless of how or for whom votes are cast. That’s the best lesson of all.”)

The last incorrect prediction I made was in my kitchen Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2000 at 9 p.m., when I said, as “Law & Order” was coming on, that, 10 p.m. having arrived in Washington, D.C., it was too late for the U.S. Supreme Court to announce a decision.

One minute later, the NBC News Special Report graphics popped onto the screen, with Tom Brokaw announcing that the Supremes had finally decided, and it was, he said, “a split decision.” The only problem with that was that, as NBC’s Dan Abrams pointed out two seconds later, standing in front of the Supreme Court with veteran reporter Carl Stern, that wasn’t the case. As Abrams and Stern, reading through the decision live as millions watched, reported, the Supreme Court’s decision awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush, finally ending our long national nightmare.

One effect of the 2000 electionathon was that the networks deliberately held off announcing the 2004 winner until the morning after the election, even though the result seemed apparent to us non-TV experts. This seemed unusual, but it really wasn’t, because in the old days before high-speed computers, unless the results were a foregone conclusion of the 1952, 1956 or 1964 variety, to have to wait for the networks to call the election until Wednesday morning wasn’t unusual. And, of course, there’s always something unusual in every campaign — for instance, McCain’s campaign was believed dead a year ago, and Obama had no chance against Hillary Clinton.

One thing that will be interesting about tonight will be finding out in the next few days which of the national polls were closest to the correct result. On Monday Rasmussen Reports gave Obama 52 percent, vs. McCain’s 46 percent, and 260 electoral votes vs. McCain’s 168. The Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll, touted as the most accurate predictor of the 2004 election, had Obama on Monday at 47.5 percent and McCain at 43 percent, with 9.5 percent undecided.

For voters, the election will be over at 8 p.m. For the media, the fun will be just beginning.