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The Day That Hope Came Home

America: November 7, 2020.

So, confession: As a shameless election junkie and statistical analysis addict, I knew Joseph Biden was going to win the election, refusing to waver or move off that rock — even as his hopes looked precariously imperiled deep into the overnight hours of Election Day into Wednesday.

I saw the map, anticipated the blue shift in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. I drank a glass of wine, closed my laptop around 3 a.m., and sent my last text to a fretted friend, reading: “He’s got this. The only question left is how soon the rest of the world finds out.”

Then, I waited. On Wednesday, as more states turned blue and Biden’s popular vote margin yawned, I began regularly updating friends on where things stood. Mostly, I wanted to let people know when to expect the last crucial dominoes to fall, and how the unique partisan split between quickly-processed Election Day votes vs slowly-processed mail ballots made for a singularly tense and peculiar count. Those affirmations calmed almost no one … gratification delayed feels like gratification denied.

I even shared a Decision Desk election call for Biden on Friday morning, captioned: “that’s ballgame,” to which I received numerous replies of, “I’ll wait until I see it on TV.” Funny how even in this era of on-demand…