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 really it’s the beginning.
Soon enough, we will know the name of the next president. Half of America will celebrate and the other half will feel disappointment, despair, or fury – or some other emotion that evades easy description. In New Hampshire, we will start getting used to the sound of “Gov. Kelly Ayotte” or “Gov. Joyce Craig,” however that race plays out. And soon enough we’ll know, roughly, what kind of legislation has a chance of passage in Congress and the state Legislature based on which party has control of each chamber and by how many seats.
It will seem like an ending. 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 drafted and cuts entertained, all part of that difficult government dance of balancing revenue with expenditures. Your voice on what our state values – and what it doesn’t – matters right now, and it will matter even more as we move through winter, spring, and into summer.
Election fatigue is real, so take a breather when the dust settles this week. Rest up and recharge, but don’t check out. There’s too much to do, too much at stake.
On Sunday night, I rewatched a documentary titled “The War Room” for the first time in a couple of decades. It’s about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid, and largely focuses on the energy and efforts of top election architects James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. The film opens, because of course it does, on the gray winter streets of New Hampshire, just before Clinton would finish a strong second to Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts in the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary. Saddled with negative coverage of marital infidelity and accusations of draft-dodging, Clinton’s somewhat surprising finish established him as “the Comeback Kid” and helped propel him to Pennsylvania Avenue over George H.W. Bush.
It was a nice walk down memory lane before the big day, and not a bad little baseline for the proper tenor of high-stakes elections. In some ways it’s obvious that we live in a very different – and darker – political era now. The dehumanizing nature of social media has sharpened the edges too much, and the concept of “truth” is enduring a merciless beating at the hands of unrepentant liars and conspiracy theorists. But things got plenty nasty on the trail in 1992, too. (Who could forget that Gennifer Flowers press conference?) And then, when it was all over, when America at last decided to make a clean break from the Reagan-Bush years by electing the former governor of Arkansas, the months upon months of mudslinging ceased to matter.
After Election Day the story stopped being about Clinton vs. Bush. It became a long, tangled, back-and-forth story about jobs, and education, and health care, and taxes, and all of those things that don’t feel anything like the sporting events that campaigns resemble. In truth, policy was the story all along – but it’s easy to get distracted by the spectacle of it all. As easy in 1992 as it is now.
I know it goes without saying – and you’ve heard it plenty in recent weeks and months – but I truly hope you cast a vote on Tuesday. Even if you have convinced yourself that one vote doesn’t matter among the many, it will matter to how you perceive yourself. You will know, even if nobody else does, whether you held up your end of the civic bargain. You will know, even if nobody else does, whether you took your stand or fell silent when your voice mattered most. You will know, and you’ll remember.
After you vote, no matter how it all plays out, I hope you’ll do one more thing. I hope you will stay engaged, fully. I hope you’ll follow bills that are important to you and your community as they move through Congress and the Legislature. I hope you’ll remember what was promised on the trail, the vows to make things better for you and your neighbors. I hope you will hold the elected officials you hired accountable.
And I hope you will remember, even through the disappointment, excitement, or exhaustion, that nothing really ends on Election Day.
I hope you remember that it all begins now.