How to Get Through Election Day
6 min read
This might be nostalgia talking, but I miss the old Election Nights, the kind we used to have before the stakes became so gruesomely high. No one was warning of “existential consequences” or calling trauma counselors into the office.
The end of a campaign was once something to celebrate, a shining marker of our participatory traditions—a jubilee of civic duty, a peaceful transfer of power. Now the once-routine exercise of certifying electoral votes has been officially designated a “National Special Security Event.”
Ideally, this ordeal won’t last too long, and we will have something in the ballpark of clarity soon enough. Ideally, no one will get hurt or killed this time. I wish I could reassure you that our democracy will survive, no matter what.
Alas, I can say only this: Elections matter. And this one really matters. I’m guessing that you’re with me on this, and that you’re not one of those “undecideds” from the cable focus groups “still waiting to hear more specifics” from Kamala Harris or whatever. But if you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’ll be watching tomorrow with a rooting interest. And you will not be calm.
Why not at least try? Perhaps attempt something that approximates “grief minimization,” a term I came across recently that has been bubbling back up into my brain a lot. Grief minimization is a choice—or at least a worthy goal, especially this week.
I’ve spent the past several days gathering wisdom. I’ve gone back and revisited some of the solace I found useful after the earthquake of 2016. “This is not the apocalypse,” then-President Barack Obama said in a postelection interview with David Remnick of TheNew Yorker. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” Certainly, Donald Trump’s presidency was bad, maybe worse than feared. But I took Obama’s point to be that prolonged grieving would be counterproductive, a kind of self-inflicted paralysis.
Likewise, preemptive anguish achieves nothing good. My friend Amanda Ripley wrote in The Washington Post last week about a study in which women waiting to learn the results of breast biopsies were found to have similar levels of stress hormones in their saliva as women who had already learned that they had cancer. “In experiments, people who believe they have a 50–50 chance of getting a painful electric shock become significantly more agitated than people who think they have a 100 percent chance,” Ripley wrote. “Anticipating possible pain feels worse than anticipating certain pain.”
In other words, don’t wallow in the potential for, or inevitability of, a worst-case scenario. Instead, seek out distractions. Maybe edibles too.
Shop for enlightenment beforehand, which you can apply during the white-knuckle hours. To that end, I spent a few days last week reaching out to some of my favorite campaign gurus. I wasn’t seeking intel about the election itself. Rather, my goal was to assemble a last-minute tool kit of coping mechanisms and best mental-health practices.
As much as possible, we should try to make ourselves sensible consumers of the treacherous and triggering torrent of information we will soon be drowning in. Note the metaphor here, as it segues into the important piece of guidance: Be careful where you swim. Avoid needless waves and currents. This includes the majority of information you get on TV before a critical mass of returns are processed, not to mention most of the inane opinions and guesswork and “partial data” you’re getting from the various walls of broadcast noise (disguised as maps) before 9 or 10 o’clock.
“It’s extremely important to consume news on your own terms,” CNN’s Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic consultant, told me. As Election Day approaches, Begala tries to turn off every news notification on his phone that could increase his level of tension. “You cannot let anyone weaponize your amygdala against you,” Begala said, referring to the brain area that helps regulate emotions such as fear. Text bulletins, algorithms, and (God knows) social media are engineered to prey on our amygdala. But resist. You do not need this information right now, let alone predictions or useless speculation. It’s just empty-calorie pregaming. Trust me, you will learn who won and who lost. The news will find you.
In the meantime, be humble and surrender to the unknown. Again, no one knows who is going to win. I’m pretty sure it will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris (you’re welcome). Yet people still have a primal need for certainty, even when it’s obvious that none is possible. They are convinced that some special class of TV decoders exists that is in possession of secret knowledge otherwise off-limits to the uninitiated. They want to believe that these alleged super pundits are hoarding the “big secret” for themselves and their various co-conspirators.
“Some woman at LaGuardia came up to me and said, ‘Who’s going to win?’” James Carville, who will be yapping on Election Night with Brian Williams on Amazon Prime, told me. “And the guy who’s with her said, ‘Oh, he knows who’s going to win. He’s just not telling you.’”
Carville gets this a lot. “People think people like us have all the answers,” he said. Here’s a not-so-big secret: They do not.
I used to watch a lot of live sports on TV. I did this in large part because I wanted to see what happened in real time. Now, thanks to any number of screens that didn’t exist 30 years ago, I can be confident of learning exactly what happened and seeing what it looked and felt like as many times as I want. I partake of far more 10-minute YouTube synopses of NFL games than I do of full three-hour slogs (with the endless penalty flags, referee huddles, commercials, injury time-outs, official reviews, etc.). This saves me a whole lot of time and spares me a whole lot of the roller coaster.
I’m always hesitant to make sports analogies, especially with events of such terrifying magnitude as this election. Excluding those who have money on a game, sports will have very little real-life impact on most of the people who are choosing to invest emotionally in them.
Regardless, sporting events are much better-suited to television than election coverage is. When you watch a live game, the result is unfolding chronologically in front of you. That’s not possible for an event as huge and diffuse as Election Night, where partial data, secondhand projections, and “unconfirmed reports” are flying in haphazardly from all around the country. Chris Hayes had a good riff about this on MSNBC: “When you think about Election Night,” he said, “it’s like hearing the results of a full basketball game, basket by basket, but being read totally out of order, after the game already ended.”
You should really consider skipping most of this. Take a walk. Leave your phone at home. Steer clear of any news, stimuli, or people that could raise your blood pressure. This almost certainly includes Trump, who will probably declare a massively premature (and maybe erroneous) victory, no matter what the early returns say. Yes, this will be deeply irresponsible, but it should surprise no one. And any energy you devote to reacting will only sap your reserves for later, when you will need them.
I’ve seen landslide projections for both sides, and cogent arguments for why pollsters might be undercounting the support of both candidates. But a very close race remains the most likely scenario. Pace yourself and be realistic. Breathe, meditate, pray, seek simple pleasures, and be kind. It’s okay to be scared about whatever might unfold. Appropriate, even.
Rest assured, you will have a sizable community of fellow basket cases to commiserate with. Take comfort in them. Reach out and say you love them.
“This is easily the highest-stakes election of my life where I have not been personally involved,” Mac Stipanovich, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist in Florida, told me. Stipanovich, a Never Trump Republican, says he is as nervous about tomorrow “as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
Stipanovich wouldn’t speculate on an election result. But I got the gist: Anxiety is a natural side effect of this exercise, and maybe even a privilege of a democracy—if we can keep it.
