Presidential elections can feel like sporting events. But ‘winning’ is just the beginning. (Dana Wormald | New Hampshire Bulletin)
Election Day is a lot like high school graduation: it feels like an ending, but it’s actually the beginning.
Soon we will know the name of the next president. Half of America will celebrate and the other half will feel disappointment, despair, or anger – or some other emotion that defies easy description. In New Hampshire, we will get used to the sound of “Gov. Kelly Ayotte” or “Gov. Joyce Craig,” however that race plays out. And soon we’ll know roughly what kind of legislation has a chance of passage in Congress and state legislatures, based on which party controls each chamber and how many seats.
It will seem like an end. It will be anything but.
Before 2025 arrives, newly elected and re-elected New Hampshire lawmakers will be hard at work shaping the next biennial state budget. Priority lists will be drawn up and cuts will be made, all part of the government’s difficult dance of balancing revenues and expenditures. Your voice on what our state values – and what it doesn’t – matters right now, and will become even more important as we get through the winter, spring and summer.
Election fatigue is real, so take a breather when the dust settles this week. Rest and recharge, but don’t check out. There’s too much to do, too much at stake.
Sunday night I rewatched a documentary called “The War Room” for the first time in a few decades. It is about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid and focuses largely on the energy and efforts of top election architects James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. The film opens, because of course it does, in the gray winter streets of New Hampshire, just before Clinton would finish a strong second to Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts in the nation’s first Democratic primary. Saddled with negative coverage of marital infidelity and accusations of draft evasion, Clinton’s somewhat surprising end made him “the Comeback Kid” and helped propel him onto Pennsylvania Avenue over George HW Bush.
It was a nice reminder of the big day, and not a bad basis for the right tenor of a high-stakes election. In some ways it is clear that we now live in a very different – and darker – political era. The dehumanizing nature of social media has tightened the boundaries too much, and the concept of “truth” is taking a brutal beating from unrepentant liars and conspiracy theorists. But also in 1992 things became quite annoying on the road. (Who could forget that Jennifer Flowers press conference?) And when it was all over, when America finally decided to make a clean break with the Reagan-Bush years by electing the former governor of Arkansas, months upon months of mudslinging ceased to matter.
After Election Day, the story was no longer about Clinton versus Bush. It became a long, confusing story about jobs and education and health care and taxes and all those things that look nothing like the sporting events that campaigns resemble. In reality, policy has always been the story – but it’s easy to get distracted by the spectacle of it all. Just as easy in 1992 as it is now.
I know it goes without saying – and you’ve heard it a lot in recent weeks and months – but I really hope you vote on Tuesday. Even if you’ve convinced yourself that one voice doesn’t matter among many, how you perceive yourself will matter. You will know, even if no one else does, whether you have kept the civil agreement. You will know, even if no one else does, whether you took a stand or fell silent when your voice mattered most. You will know, and you will remember.
However it turns out, after you vote, I hope you’ll do one more thing. I hope you stay fully engaged. I hope you will follow bills that are important to you and your community as they move through Congress and the Legislature. I hope you will remember what was promised along the way, the vows to make things better for you and your neighbors. I hope you will hold the elected officials you hire accountable.
And I hope you’ll remember, even in the face of disappointment, excitement, or exhaustion, that nothing really ends on Election Day.
I hope you remember that it all starts now.
