A Week of Waiting
Time has never moved so slowly.
everyone wanted to talk about the election, and no one wanted to talk about the election. It loomed like a hidden planet on every Zoom call and in every group chat, its gravity dark and inescapable. We whispered about it with the same solemn, I-know-I-shouldn’t-but-Ican’t-help-it obsession you might use to talk about a close friend’s deteriorating marriage: What do you think’s going to happen? How are you feeling about it?
Every eventuality had to be acknowledged, partly as a hedge against being wrong and partly as a superstitious ritual. By Election Eve, I had become so psychologically and intellectually fragile I was willing to believe whatever I’d heard most recently, a condition of sublime, childlike impressionability I shared with the president himself. Trump would win in a landslide. Biden would lose the Rust Belt and win the Sun Belt. Trump would use force to steal the election. We were all experts now, and also we hated experts, who were smug frauds. Could any of us really say what the world looked like outside our states, our cities, our blocks, our isolation pods, our heads?
When you open up the range of possible outcomes, hope can sneak in alongside despair. So many people had voted, stepping up to have their voices heard, even if we knew those voices could be muted and distorted and maybe even eventually tossed out.
By Election Day, ambient anxiety cloaked every interaction. Every gently condescending article about election selfcare felt like a direct attack: No, I will not drink water. No, I will not meditate. No, I will absolutely not log off.
When did you first start to panic? For me, it was Florida. Not so much the fact of
Biden being projected to lose but the fact that the polls were wrong, again. To hear that is to understand what it is to be Wile E. Coyote: to have planned and schemed, to have waited for your moment, and to have found yourself ten feet off the cliff’s edge, the ground having disappeared beneath your feet, with Steve Kornacki hovering nearby calculating the precise distance you will plunge before you pancake on the canyon floor.
“Feeling very bad,” one friend sent to the group chat. “Nothing else to contribute.” Another: “Launch me into the sun.” Friends described their elaborate dinner preparations going cold, their appetites vanished like their hopes for Democratic control of the Senate. Text conversations turned to discussions of the appropriate substance pairing for the night. Even nonsmokers were smoking bad-mood cigarettes in their backyards. There were tepid attempts at reassurance, but no one was brave enough to be truly confident.
This was the moment to turn off the TV if you were going to do so. It was not going to be decided on Tuesday. We had said this to one another knowingly for weeks now, and still I fell asleep on the couch around midnight, only to wake up in a desperate panic at 4 a.m., grabbing at my phone.
By Wednesday morning, the panic seemed to have stabilized. The polls had been wrong again—but not that wrong. We stayed tethered to our phones, waiting for new information, new theories, new funny tweets. I learned that Michigan had been called for Biden when a woman in the wineshop announced it to the store. Spiraling despair was increasingly replaced with bitter frustration at lost opportunities down the ballot or sadness that once again so many people had voted for a man so obviously cruel and stupid. We’d gotten the 2016 do-over we had wanted and won. Why did it still feel a little hollow? Maybe because we received the result we had all anticipated in 2016: a presidential victory for an Establishment Democrat, a likely Republican Senate, and a future of gridlock. Court packing, covid stimulus, and the Green New Deal were returned to the same status of “in your dreams” they had occupied before Trump entered the scene. The blessed end of Trump’s tenure in the White House seemed also to mean the end of the era he’d inaugurated, a strange interregnum in which the previously unthinkable, for better and often for worse, was brought within our reach.
By Friday morning, it was easy to put aside any disappointment in favor of relief, if not jubilation. But the final calls were academic at that point. The real victory—and the accompanying glee— had come the night before, when Trump gave a rambling address that not even most of his former enablers bothered to take seriously. The addictively horrible, compulsively watchable, reality-TV president just looked like a pathetic mope. As he might have put it: Low energy! If nothing else, the election had sapped Trump of whatever power he held over the liberal psyche. Now he was just another desiccated ghoul in a party and government filled with them. Even the pessimists could enjoy the sight of a defeated Trump: As my most despairing friend put it, “Still lots of time for shit to go bad, but this is really nice to watch.”