Election Night before Twitter and cable news
If you’re the candidate, Election Day brings a surprising stillness. There are no more rallies or town halls. TV and radio ads no longer matter; newscasts have nothing of substance to report. Campaign offices empty as staff and volunteers hit the streets to help turn out voters. Across the country millions of strangers step behind a black curtain to register their policy preferences and private instincts, as some mysterious collective alchemy determines the country’s fate – and your own. The realization is obvious but also profound: it’s out of your hands now. Pretty much all you can do is wait.
That description, from President Barack Obama’s Memoir, captures the oddness of election day. Politics can be about fierce debates, difficult trade-offs, and wearing out shoe leather knocking on doors.
But when the day comes for people to vote, and especially when polls close and the results start slowly coming in, everyone has to deal with the waiting.
What happens can shape careers, cities, and countries (and, for reporters, what to write), but there’s nothing anyone can do. Obama spent that time sitting on a couch with his mother-in-law watching cable news, until the race was called and he knew what speech he’d have to give.
In anticipation of the election nights that will be happening in cities and some states across the country in November, we have put together some examples of how presidential elections have been called in the past. As you refresh Twitter, follow along with the New York Times needle, and try to piece together the numbers, know that you are taking part in a storied American tradition of feeding your anxiety with scraps of information.
1796 - John Adams
The first competitive presidential election in the United States was not resolved on Election Day, nor necessarily by the voters.
The states chose 138 electors, who each cast two votes. Whoever received the most votes would be President and the second-most would become Vice President. Electors would therefore need to coordinate amongst themselves. A unified set of Presidential-Vice Presidential votes would lead to the candidates being tied and the election going to the House. If some Electors cast their ballots for the Vice Presidential candidate but not the Presidential candidate, the ticket would be flipped, with the running mate taking the top job.
This meant that for John Adams, Election Night was more than a month of intrigue trying to identify how certain electors would vote and whether the machinations of Alexander Hamilton to place Thomas Pinckney, Adam’s VP candidate, into the Presidency, were successful. Rather than counting precinct totals, he was left with parsing out his personal relationships to those chosen as electors and their political interests.
December 8, 1796: I can Say nothing of Election. I have recd to Day the Votes of New Jersey but know not for whom they are, as they are under Seal.
The Feelings of Friendship excite a Curiosity to know how McKean will vote. By that I shall guess how Gov. Adams would have voted.
But I have Seen Friendships of S. Quincy Jona Sewall, Daniel Leonard—Gen. Brattle—Treasurer Grey and fifty others go away like a vapour before political Winds—and a constant Succession of Others go the same Way from that time to this, that I cannot depend upon any Judgment I can form from any Feelings of my own.
1852 - Franklin Pierce
By the 1850s, elections were no longer settled by the maneuverings of electors, thanks to the Twelfth Amendment, and telegraphs had made the transmission of results move at a modern pace, with the 19th-century equivalents of the networks calling the race early.
Here is what the New York Times said about the election that put New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce into the Executive Mansion.
There is nothing more notable about the recent election than the rapidity with which the result has been ascertained. The thoroughness of the victory deserves some of the credit, and the wide extension and judicious management of the telegraph, more. Enough was known, in the City at 8 ½ o’clock on Tuesday evening, to indicate the whole drift of the day’s work. Betters squared their accounts. Jubilees and dirges were tuned up; and the City swept with hosannas to Pierce and King, so vehement, wild and universal, as to justify the notion that the home majority was even greater than the melancholy fact…
Looking back eight years - for in 1848, the telegraph had reached but a small length of its present endlessness - we may recall the long and weary suspense of the public mind, awaiting the returns. Cayuga Bridge enjoyed for a whole week the fame of the Hellespontic bridge of boats, the bridge of Sighs, or that of Lodi, among people who never heard of it before. Mails at the great cities were waited for by assemblies of men numbering tens of thousands. We have changed all that. The lightning has flashed from all quarters at once, and the Whig party is annihilated. No respite, not a day’s delay, was granted. The general curiosity was not piqued and aggravated by slow and dubious returns. There were no intermittent paroxysms of elation and depression. The guillotine dell; and the Whigs were no where. Such is the completeness of the telegraphic communication; and such, oh melancholy truth! Is the completeness of the rout.
1864 - Abraham Lincoln
In the Civil War, telegraphs were still how news travelled, so Lincoln travelled to the War Department (now the OEOB) to follow the news. From Doris Kearns’ Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:
Arriving at the White House around noon, [journalist] Noah Brooks was surprised to find the President entirely alone. Lincoln felt no need to conceal his anxiety from Brooks. “I am just enough of a politician to know that there was not much doubt about the result of Baltimore convention. But about this thing. I am very far from being certain. I wish I were certain.”
As the clock struck seven, the President, accompanied by John Hay, walked over to the telegraph office to begin the long vigil. The early returns were positive, revealing large Republican majorities, though New York, with its large number of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants, remained in doubt. By the hour of midnight, however, when a supper of fried oysters was served, Lincoln’s victory was assured… It was after 2am when Lincoln left the telegraph office.
1940 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
In the mid-20th century, communication had increased, but the analytics were still lacking. From Robert Dallek’s biography of FDR.
On November 5, at Hyde Park, where he had gone to vote and track the election returns, as he had in all his past elections, he sat in his family dining room, surrounded by telephones and radios tuned to different stations, with coat off and tie loosened. Tally sheets and pencils for him to record the returns coming in from around the country sat before him on the dining room table...
As the first returns came in, Roosevelt broke into a heavy sweat and ordered Mike Reilly, his Secret Service agent, to shut the door and let no one in. He seemed to have lost his nerve, or so Reilly believed, as the possibility of losing the election had apparently badly shaken him… more likely it was another episode of what his White House physician Ross McIntire had described earlier in 1940 as “a very slight heart attack…
“For the moment, however, Roosevelt was able to recover within an hour and revel in the victory that became clear over the course of the evening. At midnight, he went out on the lawn of his Hyde Park mansion to greet his neighbors, who had assembled in a traditional torchlight parade, as they had after every one of his electoral victories. “We seem to have averted a putsch, Joe,” he told Joe Lash, an Eleanor protegé, who spent the evening with the family observing the historic events.
Although the full results wouldn’t be known until the middle of the night, there was already enough information to indicate that Roosevelt was “Safe on Third,” as a sign held up to Roosevelt’s great amusement declared.
1960 - John F. Kennedy
By the 1960s, we had reached the modern era. Television coverage had moved on from the rudimentary coverage of 1948, which saw three anchors huddled around two microphones.
Now there was more advanced studios, graphics, and even promises of technological advancements backfired spectacularly. From historian Michael Beschloss:
Starring at all three networks that evening were state-of-the-art computers, programmed to estimate returns in advance. But in a belly-flop at the start of the night, the CBS machine, an IBM 7090, concluded that Nixon, the Republican candidate, would be elected. The machine gave Nixon odds of 100 to 1, and by an Electoral College landslide of 459 to 78 votes. A nervous Kennedy, watching at his brother Robert’s home in Hyannis Port, Mass., was reassured by his pollster, Louis Harris, that the CBS prediction was “crazy.”
ABC’s Univac computer also predicted Nixon would win. As the night wore on and Kennedy’s edge became clearer, Richard Harkness of NBC boasted on the air that his network’s computer — an RCA 501, made by its corporate parent — had achieved a “truly amazing electronic coup” by predicting a narrow Kennedy victory. Twisting the knife into his network rivals, Brinkley told viewers that NBC’s computer was the only one “that has not at any time predicted Nixon would win — the others did.”
Stay up getting results
Whether you’re spending election night watching cable news to find out who will have a majority in Congress, or waiting for precincts to report a municipal race, you’re part of a long tradition of those in politics doing the only thing they can do on election night.
If you’re successful in your race, congratulations, and we hope that you consider Legislata to help you serve your constituents more efficiently.
If you are unfortunately not successful, we’ll leave you with this anecdote from Abraham Lincoln, told on the night of his re-election:
I remember, the evening of the day in 1858, that decided the contest for the Senate between Mr Douglas and myself, was something like this, dark, rainy & gloomy. I had been reading the returns, and had ascertained that we had lost the Legislature and started to go home. The path had been worn hog-back was slippery. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square, and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’