Maybe you've already voted in person at a local establishment as part of the early crowd. Or perhaps you've marked and mailed in your ballot for reasons of ease or access. Maybe you're waiting for the traditional Tuesday trip to the local school gym or church basement to sign in and make your choice. But regardless of the timing or method, as of Tuesday night you will hopefully have participated in the closest thing we have to a national religion.
Ever since the country was created we as a people have differed in multiple arenas on many things, indeed, on almost everything. We have agreed on just one, taken as an article of faith: irrespective of the scale or importance, whether it's local or national, in public settings and private venues, there comes a time when eventually we gather together, ask a question, and stick our hands in the air for or against it. The side with the most hands up wins, the other side loses. Yes, there are a thousand caveats: it has to be fair, it has to be tabulated honestly, no one can be forced to choose a side, and on and on and on. But assuming all that – and admittedly those assumptions are not so easily made anymore - the process ends at that point until it begins again. Doesn't make any difference if the question being posed is who runs the country, or what movie to watch after Thanksgiving dinner.
The exercise we are going through now is no different. That said, it has been described countless times by both sides as "the most important election ever." There is no doubt from anyone that it is consequential, as is every choice we make at every level. But just as rhetoric these days favors the superlative over any other form of adjective, it joins other instances where the end of the world was forecast if the other side won. Michigan's Secretary of State Orville E. Atwood in 1936: "The issue of the election two weeks from tomorrow is not an ordinary issue, but the question of whether the American form of government is to survive. This is the most important election of our lifetime." The Philadelphia Aurora in 1805: "Today will be held the most important election you have ever been called upon to attend." Strange bedfellows Bernie Sanders and Ralph Reed said it separately, yet almost word for word in 1996: "This is the most important election in our lifetimes and an election in which the choices have never been clearer." Elections, it seems, are like kindergarten soccer players: they are all the bestest.
Yet in each case, and in many others similarly described, someone won, and someone lost, and well, we're still here. Yes, if you were on the losing side perhaps things didn't go the way you wanted in any number of ways. In some cases the outcome was indeed transformational, like the 1860 election of Lincoln which effectively heralded the Civil War. More recently, we have lurched back and forth across some moving center line, with policies of consequence rising and falling, not a swing state, but rather a swing country. And again, we're still here.
Is this time different from all those others? If one side wins will we embark in a direction that is inalterable should the pendulum try and swing back? Will that swing prove so transformational (as both sides are saying) that the laws of physics will be suspended as if someone grabbed that pendulum and tacked it to the wall high on one side or the other? Yes, there may be changes, policies, approaches that are dramatic, and so it does make a difference whom we elect. But it's also probable that that very outcome makes it more likely that in the next iteration things will swing back again, to the despair or delight of each side.
I know what outcome I prefer. But I also know that for every one of me there is someone across the line who feels the same way in the other direction. That's why the race is dead even. My hope is less that I win, but that whatever the outcome, there will be another chance four years hence to make a choice once again. Yes, this is the most important election ever... until the next one.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford wants it to be over and to see what the winners... and losers... will actually do. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
