The Good News of Record Voter Turnout

The slightly eerie element of this Election Day has been the linelessness. So many Americans had already voted—by mail, at early in-person voting sites, at legally contested “curbside” polling places or drop boxes—that there were not many people left to clog the polling sites at junior high schools and senior citizens’ centers this morning. Our family of four wandered into our local polling site, in Massachusetts, a bit after 8 A.M., as casually as if we were dropping off a package. There were no lines, no surrogates wearing pins or handing out literature, just a public-health notice reminding us to maintain social distance. Joe Biden visited his childhood home, in Scranton, leaving a message scrawled on the living-room wall, in an elegant, Presidential-looking cursive: “From this house to the White House with the grace of God.” Donald Trump retweeted a video of a caravan of horse-drawn carriages, each flying a big Trump-Pence banner, speeding past a gas station, over the caption: “The Amish are not playing around today.” For the rest of us, at least those of us who chose to vote in person today, there was just the lightly nightmarish feeling of arriving at a party that has already ended.

By the time that early voting ended on Monday, more than a hundred million votes had been cast across the country; by the time that polls close on Tuesday evening, the expectation is that more than a hundred and fifty million votes will have been cast, easily surpassing 2016’s total of a hundred and thirty-seven million. In Texas, Hawaii, Montana, and Washington, more people voted early this year than voted at all in 2016. In Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, the 2020 early-vote totals were more than ninety per cent of the total vote last time. Some analysts tried to compare the partisan registrations of this year’s early voters with those from 2016, but, by midafternoon, there was no consensus on whether things looked better or worse for the President than expected. All that anyone could agree on is that the final voter numbers are going to be huge.

That itself is a triumph, and maybe not a small one. If the total vote passes a hundred and fifty million, that will mean a higher proportion of eligible Americans have voted this year than in any Presidential election since 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt’s patrician Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, easily defeated the crusading left-wing populist William Jennings Bryan. After Trump’s election, in 2016, when both parties ran notably unpopular candidates, many feared that the American political system might simply wither from a pox-on-both-their-houses despair. The Washington Post adopted a new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It was prophetic-sounding, but not (so far, at least) actually prophetic. Trump has drawn millions of people into the public debate who had not been there before—against him, most visibly, but also for him. If it seems a little breathtaking that the turnout should be so huge, then it also seems appropriate, for an election that might grant a second term to a President with authoritarian instincts. Is our democracy intact, or is it, in small ways, doing some dying? It’s a few hours too early to say. But whatever is happening, it isn’t happening in darkness.