It is hard to imagine a more fitting place than a casino in Reno, Nevada, to conclude what was surely the most depressing day in my (admittedly brief) life as an American citizen. I found myself there on November 2 after having driven up from San Francisco to do election-day work. That seemed much more efficacious than anything that would have been possible in long-foregone California.
I had passed the day in Douglas County, some ways south of the self-proclaimed “Biggest Little City in the World,” driving at times for a half-hour between houses on dirt tracks in the desert, the snow-capped eastern face of the Sierra Nevada looming above, my canvassing crew of four Bay Area 20-somethings doing its damnedest to be sure the good registered Democrats and independents in this corner of the country didn’t forget to make it out to vote for the right Yalie.
This, of course, was a scene replayed in thousands of other places across the country. Four million more 18- to 29-year-olds voted this year than in 2000 (and voted for John Kerry by a nine-point margin), a striking 9.3-percent increase in turnout that can be traced to mobilization drives sponsored by both parties and groups like MoveOn and America Coming Together. Many were energized to get involved in politics for the first time by their opposition to the war in Iraq or the campaign of Howard Dean. Many others, like myself, had long been active in more radical forms of organizing and advocacy but had been alienated from a reactive and centrist Democratic Party. This time around, though, we acted out of our mortal fear of what another four years of George W. Bush might mean for the state of our nation and world.
No matter the particular reasons my own fellow canvassers and I had for our election-day activity, the point of unity we held was a strong one. And it was a fantastic day in a stunningly beautiful part of the country, a day in which we met Democrats living in a county where Republicans outnumber them by more than 2 to 1 (14,577 to 6,916, to be exact). They were enormously happy to see people of like minds in the Bush country of the rural American West. Only twice did we come across crotchety survivalists shouting us off their property and making clear their desire not to vote at all.
At day’s end, just past the poll-closing time of 7 p.m., we made our way through the maze of slot machines in the Reno Hilton and headed toward the theater where the Nevada Democratic Party had set up shop for its “victory party.” It seemed ominous to pass the rows of senior citizens literally chained to those machines, their casino cards inserted and attached to their pocket by coiled plastic cord. For these American legions, the election seemed a far-off distraction as they blankly pushed a single button, even the satisfying mechanical pull of the lever foregone as an unnecessary impediment to the facile attainment of instant gratification (or, more often, instant defeat) again and again and again.
We rushed past, anxious not to miss the return news during the few minutes’ walk from the car radio to the three massive TV screens in the theater, and we soon found the gaudily decked-out hall where the get-out-the-vote army had assembled. There, local partisans and blue-state missionaries like ourselves -- who most certainly would have been called “Reds” in another era of ascendant American jingoism -- absently munched on celery sticks and stared at the side-by-side visages of Wolf Blitzer, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings. The mood in the hall quickly deteriorated as the highs wrought by hours of exit-poll data predicting a resounding victory for Kerry gave way to actual returns from the states that mattered.
What quickly became clear is that the massive -- and massively successful -- effort by the Democratic Party and its allies to mobilize, register, and turn out the historical base of support (urban, working class, and minority) was not enough. For every Democratic voter stacked outside a polling place in inner-city Akron, Ohio, or Jacksonville, Florida, there was one or more new Republican voter in an outlying area to compensate. Even in Douglas County, where we ultimately helped to get out some 2,500 more votes for Kerry than Al Gore received four years ago, Bush posted a gain of nearly 4,000 voters from the last time out -- and this in a county where the number of registered voters had actually declined slightly since the last election.
Confusion giving way to despair, it was empirically plain not only that a huge portion of people in this country feel a deep, affirmative affinity with the particular moral vision that the president and his handlers embody, but that an unprecedented 60 million of them had actually turned out to vote. The fact that this surprised us was perhaps a commentary more on our abiding approach to politics than the results themselves. For we had refused to take seriously the notion that hard realities -- about a catastrophic war in Iraq; a troubled economy; a skyrocketing national deficit; a working-class populace laid off, uninsured and buried in debt -- could actually be surpassed in this election by the fear, in Jon Stewart's phrasing, of the “idea of two dudes kissing.”
In the bald political terms of the moment, what seemed even more important is Bush and Co.’s ability to effectively project a devastatingly simple set of moral ideas about the world, a set of ideas that is easily met, digested, understood, and believed.
With such thoughts in my head, I stumbled out of the Hilton theater at 1 a.m. on November 3 and onto the felt jungle of the casino floor with my ground-game comrades, the loss of Ohio seemingly a done deal. In those moments, both the enormity and the necessity of the task that lay ahead were evident: altering the political trajectory of the United States. That project commenced on November 3, 2004; it will last decades; and it can only have one outcome. It will entail not only the building, strengthening, and coalescing of grass-roots movements but also the (re)development of an opposition party with a lucid worldview and clear moral language of its own.
That night, my friends and I settled into the most readily available salve for our sorrows, the blackjack table, the willful loss of a bit of cash seeming the most fitting coda to our exertions. A middle-aged woman, grasping a cigarette and some iridescent green beverage in one hand, sized us up as we sat down. “Not a good night for Massachusetts liberals, eh, boys? George W. Boy, he did it,” she chortled as she raked another stack of chips to her pile. “He did it. How ’bout that?”
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a writer based in San Francisco. He recently returned from spending a year in Havana, Cuba, as a Parker Huang Fellow from Yale University.
