It was a night filled with JOY.
Susan and I started watching hours before any of the polls were due to close, just to get a feeling for the general tenor of things. Then polls did begin closing, and returns began coming in …
It was basically an inverse of what I saw four years ago: there was never a time, at any point through the night, when DJT wasn’t ahead. (In 2020, he was artificially kept behind because the news people simply wouldn’t call any state that would have put him ahead, until there was a win on the other side that would head off any unseemly lead.) I didn’t trust it, waiting for the bottom to fall out when the big blue states started coming in; that just never really happened, red gains staying ahead of blue catch-up. I wouldn’t go to bed, though, not till the basic contest was decided. Then, when it finally was, I stayed up to see the victory speech, just because that made a proper endpoint.
(I didn’t fail to notice that the loser’s spokesman told the crowd gathered at Howard University to go home and wait for the results, a chilling reprise of the similar dismissal at the Javits Center in 2016.)
So, finally, satisfied and relieved, we went to bed at 2 o’clock this morning.
Happily unburdened by what had been.