Nobody made any major gaffes between the conventions and the election. At times it seemed like the winner would be the guy who made the fewest mistakes, or the loser would be the guy who made the last mistake. Fortunes were spent on advertising in the few remaining swing districts. The polls consistently showed McCain beating Obama, but the margin was thin, in some places less than the statistical error rate. It was going down to the wire.
Election night we turned one of the conference rooms into a war room. I couldn't be at McCain headquarters, since he had his own advisers and people there. I couldn't overshadow his parade. Instead, Frank and Will set up a bank of monitors, each tuned to a different network, and then a mess of us sat down and watched. Besides Frank and me, Marilyn was with us, occasionally rooting for the other side, just to get our goats. She earned multiple raspberries for that. Marty Adrianopolis came over, and Mindy stayed late as well. Brewster even sat in, with his cell phone nailed to his ear the entire night.
Even though I wasn't running, I still had duties to attend to. As was the tradition, I had to call all the new winners and congratulate them, Republican and Democrat, House and Senate. In a typical election year, this might work out to about 40 new Representatives and Senators. For instance, in my 1990 election to Congress, only 15 sitting Congressmen were tossed out, including Andy Stewart, who I had beaten. Probably about as many simply retired. Contrast that to the 1994 elections, when Newt and the rest of the Gang of Eight wrested control of Congress from the Democrats. There was a 60 seat swing in the House! Add in the Senate (another 10) and the various replacements from retirement, and Bill Clinton probably had made well over 100 phone calls that night. I had never had half of that.
The networks all trotted out their latest digital tricks to keep things exciting. In our war room, we brought out a bunch of white boards, and then made jokes about the networks. At 8:00, the first few races began to be called, and some trends became apparent. For one thing, Democrats were turning out in droves, but turnout also seemed higher in traditionally Republican districts. For whatever it was worth, having a black Presidential candidate had stoked everybody's fires. You were either coming out to vote him in, or coming out to prevent that from happening.
Nothing much was decided as the first states closed their polls. Probably the first state to be called was Massachusetts, for Barack Obama. That surprised nobody. I couldn't remember the last time Massachusetts voted for a Republican. I'm sure it must have happened sometime, but I wasn't sure it happened in my lifetime. (I mentioned that to Marty, who corrected me. Both Eisenhower and Reagan had taken Massachusetts both times, but that was it.) As things currently stood, if Jesus was a Republican and Lucifer was a Democrat, Lucifer would win Massachusetts by a wide margin.
Slowly, though, a trend emerged. By 9:00, as blank spots on the television maps began to become red or blue, and as our white board began to be marked up, I looked over at Brewster curiously. "Is it my imagination, or is this déjà vu all over again?"
"That's the way I'm reading it, at least so far.", he agreed.
Marty added, "I think everybody just wasted six billion dollars!"
"Christ on a crutch!", I muttered. It was crazy, but I think the only thing anybody had accomplished with all the money was make the investors of every local television station in the swing districts a bunch of money. The Northeast was going solidly Democratic and the South was still solidly Republican. Ohio and Pennsylvania, and a few of the Rust Belt states were still too close to call, so it might be a long night. Jeb Bush nailed Florida down, which John had hoped he would do; I had notably failed to deliver Maryland for George Bush eight years ago. We were going to be watching this until at least 11:00, before the West finished up.
Amidst all this, every few minutes somebody would hand me a name and a little Post-It Note with some details on a Congressional or Senatorial newcomer who had just won. A call would be arranged and I would congratulate them, and I would promise to meet them and congratulate them in person in January. It seemed like about the same number and tempo of newbies as the last couple of elections, though the Senate was going more Democratic. That didn't surprise me, in that Senate elections are statewide, and gerrymandering doesn't really help them. This didn't seem to be developing into a watershed election, where the prevailing theme was 'Throw the rascals out!' I had seen that in 1994, when the Republicans cleaned out the Dems, and on my first go, it occurred in both 2008 and 2010, first for the Democrats, and then for the Republicans.
Everything about this election said that we weren't throwing out the rascals. Whoever won as President was going to have to deal with the current crop of rascals. Unless things changed radically as the polls closed going westward, we would have a Republican House, with probably the same margin as now, and a slightly Democratic Senate, with the Dems picking up one or two seats.
John McCain picked up the entire South, and almost all of the Midwest and the Rockies. Barack Obama took the Northeast, the West Coast, Illinois, and a big chunk of the Mid-Atlantic region. It was a repeat of 2004, with only a few variations. It finally came down to the Rust Belt. John needed to take either Ohio or Pennsylvania to lock it up. He took both, with Ohio being called at 11:15, and Pennsylvania not being called until almost dawn the next morning.
Despite the landslide appearance of the final Electoral College count, the popular vote count was not a landslide. John McCain had won the popular vote by only 51% to 49%, much lower than my numbers had been in 2004. I did not take this to mean I had run a better campaign, far from it. By any number of measures, John was a better campaigner than I had ever been. His problem was who he had run against. Barack Obama had been wildly popular to the Democrats. In the states that voted for him, especially in the Democratic strongholds, he commanded from 60% to almost 70% of the popular votes. It was a lot closer in some of the Southern states that John had won, where the black voter turnout had been high, and John had only scraped up percentages from just over 50% to perhaps 55%.
I wondered whether it would have been different if Hillary had won the Democratic primary. As far as the Republicans were concerned she was just as polarizing as Obama had been, but to the Democrats she was almost as popular as Obama was. It might not have been vastly different. Regardless, there was an air of excited exhaustion around our little conference room. We had won, which is a whole shitload better than losing!
I delayed calling either man until almost midnight, after we heard that Obama had called John and conceded. John I congratulated and promised to support, Obama I complimented on a good and tough fight. Politics 101. As I made the calls, I glanced over at the couch Marilyn was sitting in. She had fallen asleep about 9:30 or so, much to everybody's amusement, and had only woken when she heard the final cheering. She gave us all a disgusted raspberry and then fell asleep again, sitting at the end of the couch, leaning against the armrest, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, and snoring. Stormy was sprawled out on the couch next to her, head in Marilyn's lap, and she was sleeping, too. After I made the calls, I stood up and thanked everybody, and promised I would talk to them in the morning, and then tapped Marilyn on the shoulder. She snorted and shook herself awake, and I led her and the dog back up to the Residence for a decent sleep.