Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded.
It was later determined that votes were ruthlessly suppressed in African American precincts in an election overseen by a ruthlessly partisan GOP Secretary of State. And it was one of those huge disappointment nights in which we assumed from the polling that Kerry was going to win, the exit polls early in in the day had everyone celebrating and then, as the night wore, we saw George W. Bush slowly take the lead with Ohio hanging in the balance.
I don’t think I need to recapitulate 2016.
There have always been close elections, of course. Look at Kennedy Nixon in 1960. But the only election I can remember being an unadulterated victory in the last 20 years is 2008. Even 2012 seemed like it might be a nailbiter that didn’t turn out to be. So Donald Trump’s insistence that the election should be “called” on election night is a throwback to some elections in his past. Since the country re-sorted the two parties into an ideologically polarized body politic centered in individual states, elections tend to be close, because of the electoral college. (The Senate, as well.) Obama was the outlier in 08.