They warned us. They said it would not be over right away. They said it could take days for all the votes to be counted. They told us to wait for the slow gears of democracy to grind toward a conclusion.
Or, as Ian Dunt, a British political journalist, said on Twitter: “There’s not enough booze in all the world for sitting through the American election results.”
As Tuesday night wore on and it became clear that what each side had hoped for — a definitive win that would end this election for good — was unlikely to materialize, it was important to remember what Jim Kenney, the mayor of Philadelphia, had asked of his city before Election Day began: “Patience.”
“After the polls close, and in the ensuing days, we will continue to need your patience,” he wrote in an open letter to his city. “Never in the history of this city have so many people voted by mail. By law, staffers are not allowed to start opening and counting these ballots until Election Day itself.”
Mr. Kenney noted that the results in Pennsylvania — and, by extension, the rest of the country — might not be known for a while. That’s the message election officials everywhere have been trying to emphasize, as they cope with the pandemic reality of a record number of mail-in ballots.
“This has been the slow-moving election from hell with all the early voting,” Drew McKissick, the chairman of South Carolina’s Republican Party, said on Monday, eagerly anticipating its end. “It’s been draining.”
The overriding prediction has been that getting through this election would indeed take patience, although it’s anyone’s guess for how long. (How long is a piece of string? It feels as if the country is playing a brutal, penalty-filled soccer game that will almost certainly go into extra time — but we don’t yet know how long that extra period will last.)
The specter of civil unrest has loomed large in the mind of voters like Paulino Leon, 70, a Tucson, Ariz., voter who identifies as an independent. On Tuesday, he said he was confident of a Biden victory, but was not sure that President Trump would accept the results.
“I bought canned food and have things set up in my house so I can stay there for at least two months,” he said. “And I’ve got my guns.”
Stationed outside a polling station in Atlanta’s historically Black West End neighborhood so that he could help direct residents of a local senior center to their proper polling place at a nearby library, Mark Robinson, 55, noticed two things in the parking lot: a big, gray-black Dodge Ram pickup truck festooned with flags and operated by a driver who exited the lot after being spotted, and a Chevrolet Suburban occupied by an agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, there to ensure that the voting ran smoothly.
Mr. Robinson said he felt as if violence was “almost assured” in America on Election Day. “I don’t think I’m being pessimistic,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s recent comments about the far-right Proud Boys group. “I mean, the president said ‘Stand back and stand by,’” he said. “I’m presuming that’s what they’re doing.”
In Minneapolis, Justin Salzl, 41, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump, despite finding the president too brash and tweet-happy. He also said his plan was to vote and then “go dark” — order takeout sushi with his family, go to bed without watching the news and check the results in the morning.
That may be the smart approach. According to Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, anticipatory dread only increases as waiting continues.
“Quite a lot of research suggests that the worst is yet to come as far as anxiety,” said Professor Sweeny, who specializes in the psychology of waiting.
“Even people who are general optimists show a decline in optimism as the moment of truth draws nearer,” she said.
Contributing to the current difficulty is that no one seemed able to predict when this nirvanic (or hellish, depending) “moment of truth” might actually arrive. That left people fretting and obsessing even more, particularly about the direction they see the country going in.
“As individuals, we’ve all developed more of a capacity for hate,” said Angela Smith, 35, one of about a dozen people waiting to vote at the Bigler Street polling place in South Philadelphia Tuesday morning. “We are all capable of hating in a way that I didn’t think was possible until now.”
Ms. Smith, a teacher, mostly laid the blame on the Trump administration, which she said had sent out misinformation “and all kinds of things that get people churning and burning.”
“In my lifetime, I’ve never seen anything like this in America,” she said.
Michael Miller, director and co-founder of the New York Meditation Center, said it was important not to play out unpleasant situations in one’s head.
“This whole season has been focused on speculating about what is going to happen,” he said. “But getting caught up in the moment-by-moment question of what results are coming in — that has never been good practice.”
Stay in the present, he counseled. Clean your oven, rake some leaves, go for a walk, take off your shoes, feel the carpet on your feet. Breathe.
Election 2020 ›
How to Follow the Election Results
Here’s a guide to The Times’s election night coverage, no matter when, how or how often you want to consume it.
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- If you just want results... There will be a results map on The Times’s home page, and yes, the infamous needle will be back — but only for Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, the only states providing granular enough information for our experts to make educated projections of uncounted votes.
- If you want constant updates... Times reporters are live-blogging all day and night. This will be your one-stop shop for minute-by-minute updates: race calls, on-the-ground reporting from swing states, news about any voting issues or disruptions, and more.
- If you want to check in every so often... Times journalists are also producing a live briefing from roughly 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. ET, with an overview of what’s happening in the presidential race, the Senate and House races, and the voting process itself.
“If you think, ‘Don’t think about the election, don’t think about the election, don’t think about the election,’ then the election has become your mantra,” he said, “and that’s not going to do you any good.”
All day, officials exhorted the public to stay calm and not to expect a result too quickly.
In a joint statement, officials from a disparate coalition of groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the National Association of Evangelicals; the A.F.L.-C.I.O; and the National African American Clergy Network — implored people to wait peacefully until every last vote had been counted.
“With voting ending today, it is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws,” the statement said. “We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual.
“It is important to remember that challenges are a normal part of every election,” the statement read. “We are confident our country and its institutions can rise to this historic moment.”
Good luck along the way.
“What is the German word for ‘feeling physically nauseous from anxiety at the news but also morbidly unable to look away and stop scrolling,’” the novelist Celeste Ng wrote on Twitter.
Mac Stipanovich, a Republican strategist and lobbyist in Florida who was intimately involved in the slow-burn nightmare of the 2000 election (his candidate won, but still), said that in many ways, it’s easier to be a campaign operative or a volunteer during stressful elections. Even if the tide is going against you, you’re too busy doing your job to indulge in your distress.
“It’s like having a broken foot and then being shot in the other leg — you don’t notice the foot so much,” he said.
Things are harder for regular voters whose civic engagement consists, basically, of one moment of voting followed by a million moments of catastrophizing.
“I try to distract myself,” Mr. Stipanovich said on Monday. “Yesterday I walked for seven miles. Today I’m mowing and edging. I might go for a drive.”
He was also trying to avoid flaming his enemies on social media. “I will scan Twitter looking for news stories in which the vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida pops up and says something dumb,” Mr. Stipanovich said. “Whereas I would have engaged in the past, now I don’t, because it’s pointless.”
Judy Betty, a 79-year-old retired school principal from Marana, Ariz., a suburb of Tucson, said on Monday that her mood was swinging like a pendulum between manic and depressed, depending on which news sources she listened to and which polls she read. As a Trump supporter, she said she had been heartened by the size and enthusiasm of the crowds at his most recent rallies.
Her husband, Jim, a retired accountant, declared that if the president were to lose, he would liquidate the family’s stocks on Wednesday.
For her part, Ms. Betty said that she intended to watch the election results roll in on TV Tuesday night. The plan, at least as far as she had a plan, was to limit herself to “one cocktail.”
Reporting was contributed by Rebecca Ruiz from Charleston, S.C., Richard Fausset from Atlanta, Jon Hurdle from Philadelphia, Matt Furber from Minneapolis and Hank Stephenson from Tucson, Ariz.
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