A 'Vote today' sign is seen as rain comes down the evening of election day at Bayfield County's Cable Community Center polling location in Cable, Wis., on Nov. 5.Erica Dischino/Reuters
Charles Evans Hughes went to bed thinking he defeated Woodrow Wilson in 1916. He didn’t. Harry Truman went to bed thinking he had lost the 1948 election to Thomas Dewey. He won. John Kerry went to bed in 2004 not knowing whether he had won or lost. He lost.
A lot happens in American politics after bedtime – which is what many of the 335 million people who live in the United States discovered when they retired for the night on Tuesday not knowing whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris was the 47th president.
For the second consecutive election, and for the fourth time this century, millions of Americans were tucked into their beds – sleeping fitfully, restlessly, uneasily – without knowing the result of the 2024 election. The Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup Final and the NBA championship come to an end at a reasonable time. There is no clock in an American election. Church bells rang around midnight the night in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected – but George W. Bush and Al Gore waited 36 days in 2000 to discover who would succeed Bill Clinton.
This time, the long process of voting – some Americans cast their ballots as early as 50 days before election day – once again is followed by the long process of waiting. This long day’s journey into, and possibly beyond, night may be as agonizing, as disorienting, as infuriating, as the campaign itself.
“Uncertainty is worse for your mental health than certainty,” said Charles Raison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. “Even getting definitive bad news is less disturbing than not knowing about something that is really important.”
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Some Americans, of course, pulled all-nighters. They’re denizens of what the noted expert on human behaviour Francis Albert Sinatra crooned about when he sang about “the city that never sleeps.”
“We like to be in control and we have this hope that if we just stay awake a little bit longer, it will work out,” said Christine Whelan of the Emory University Center for the Study of Human Health. “It won’t. Once we cast our ballots, we have done all that we can do. And, really, we should be thinking about this as election week rather than election day.”
Or – in the case of the 1876 election, when the identity of the winner (Rutherford B. Hayes) wasn’t known for four months after the voting – election months. The wrangling lapped into 1877, when the Republican governor of Ohio finally prevailed after a contentious interregnum. It was two days before inauguration day. Forty years later, Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes went to bed thinking he had ended Woodrow Wilson’s re-election hopes.
“A reporter came later asking to speak with him and was told that the president-elect was asleep,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the prominent American presidential biographer. “‘Well,’ the reporter said, ‘tell him when he wakes up, he is no longer the president-elect.’”
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This postvoting period of anguish is baked into a political system marked by two competing parties, and this year, by two competing candidates, in a political deadlock.
States have different deadlines and processes for counting mail-in ballots; some of them couldn’t start tallying them up until Tuesday. Though the results in three West Coast states, Alaska and Hawaii are all but certain, New Mexico and Arizona are in the Mountain Time Zone, with their results likely coming long after East Coast television viewers have retired. And then there is the presence of a handful of swing states whose results are critical but also will likely be criticized by one camp or another.
“The margin across swing states is likely to be slim, which means more ballots will need to be counted in order for a projected winner to be announced,” said Alauna Safarpour, a Gettysburg College political scientist seconded to The Washington Post election desk this week. “Pennsylvania in particular is unlikely to have counted enough mail-in ballots on election night for news organizations to project a winner on election night. However, it is likely we could have a result later this week.”
That seemed possible in 2004, when Mr. Kerry was challenging George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.
“We needed one state to win and had provisional ballots out after lots of hiccups at polling places in Ohio,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Tuesday.
“We had gone to court to keep polling places open since Democratic precincts went much slower than Republican districts.” It was for naught. Michigan was called for the future secretary of state at 5:30 the next morning but it was not enough. He conceded at 11 a.m. the day after election day.
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These complications were not in play in 1964, 1972 and 1984 – times when Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, respectively, glided to re-election landslides.
“We knew the outcome within minutes of the first returns coming in,” said David Lillehaug, a retired Minnesota State Supreme Court justice who was a young aide for former vice-president Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Mr. Reagan. “I think I started crying shortly thereafter and continued intermittently up to and including his concession speech. I was 30 years old and thought at least part of the world had come to an end.”
For some this year, there will be tears, and there will be the sad conviction that part of the world has come to an end, when the election results are finalized. But traces of the torment of waiting will long endure. Until then, the whole country will be in the peculiar form of election misery that gripped John F. Kennedy in 1960.
“Now, at the hour of 20 minutes to 4 in the morning, as he crossed the lawn to his own home,” Theodore H. White wrote of that period of uncertainty, “he could not tell whether he had won or lost – and, if he won or lost, whether this election spoke America’s past or its future.”