I was working at full tilt on election day in 2004. I had multiple teams deployed throughout Montgomery County in the Philadelphia suburbs doing GOTV. We had registered thousands of people to vote and had knocked on all our targeted doors at least three times prior to election day. I wasn’t knocking on doors that day. I was driving people from place to place in one of our fleet of vans and listening to the news reports on the radio. It looked for all the world like we were rolling to victory. Things on the ground in Pennsylvania looked fantastic and were exceeding all our models. In fact, we did better than we originally expected but much worse than we thought we were doing on election day. We won Pennsylvania and boosted Kerry’s results in Montgomery County more than three percent higher than Gore’s. But something had gone wrong. Something had gone wrong all across the country and in the exit polls. We can argue forever about what happened, but we didn’t get our asses kicked. He lost narrowly because we slightly underperformed expectations. We didn’t lose in 2000, either. We actually won and had our victory snatched away from us by a combination of flukes, voter suppression, and Supreme Court overreach. In 1998, we actually won despite all predictions that we would lose. It’s been a very long time since we got our asses kicked. In fact, the last time we got our asses kicked was in 1994, and I was only twenty-five years old.
Tomorrow, we are going to get our asses kicked again. I don’t really remember what it is like. But I do remember what it was like to finish my day at 8pm on election day in 2004 thinking that we had just thrown Bush and Cheney out of office only to watch the returns come in and realize that we hadn’t. So, go vote, make phone calls, knock on doors, contact your social networks, and hope that things are not really as bad as they appear to be.
