Cloudy with a chance of precipitation

Thoughts on the fulcrum of Election Day

I think it’s safe to say we’re all living with the greatest level of political uncertainty in a presidential election in our lifetimes (which in my case is a memory that stretches back to 1972). Certainly there have been close elections and surprising outcomes, of which 2016 ranks high in the surprise category. But I can’t recall a race that seems so fraught, and when I think back over the history of presidential elections in the last 200 years, I can only think of two that were as tense: 1860 and 1932.

In a way, these are misplaced comparisons, because in both cases the outcomes were clearly foreseeable. A split in the Democratic Party meant that Abraham Lincoln had a lock in the Electoral College in 1860 (even though he only took 39% of the popular vote), and everybody knew that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going to win in a landslide. But there was widespread anxiety about what would happen in the aftermath in both cases. In Lincoln’s case, of course, the answer was the Civil War: a catastrophe, though it’s one that initially unspooled in slow motion with a good deal of uncertainty in the months after Election Day. In FDR’s case, there was a similar period of limbo before he took office, eventually followed by the more positive outcome of the New Deal. Notwithstanding widespread doubts, the republic survived in both cases.

We have widespread doubts again. Actually, there’s a part of me whose doubts regard the outcome as irrelevant. I think the United States is sleepwalking through a geopolitical situation that is likely to drag us into war no matter who is president, and our parlous fiscal state—so much debt—is vulnerable to a sudden shock if an unexpected economic jolt shakes investor confidence. But the immediate threat seems to be violence in the streets regardless of the outcome. I hope, maybe even believe, such fears are exaggerated. But I don’t think they can be dismissed.

I’m standing on one side of a precipice imagining what I’ll think and feel this time tomorrow and in the coming days. It’s remarkable that a pending reality can seem so opaque. All we can do is strap in. And wait.