EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: Election Day, again

I woke up early today so I could shuffle outside in the lingering darkness to see the blood-red moon.

It’s a terrible harbinger for Election Day, if you believe in that sort of thing. But as we’ve seen, when an election looms close, people are willing to believe all sorts of outlandish things.

I’m writing this Tuesday morning, before I head out to the precincts to gather string, before I find a place to watch the returns, before the results come in and I am once again reminded of that eternal truth in American politics: the bastards almost always win. Then, like always, I’ll sublimate my ego with reporting and writing and editing so we can get our coverage out in the world by midnight or so. I’ll weep, figuratively speaking, on my own time.

Elections don’t make me cry, not even in 2013, when I was fired on Election Day, nor in 2016, when I had to leave the Guilford GOP watch party at the Moose Lodge and sprint back to the office to tell our art director, Jorge, that Trump would be the next president of the United States. He almost cried.

“How can that be?” he asked.

The bastards, I told him. They almost always win.

Almost!

I was there when Yvonne Johnson became the first Black mayor of Greensboro in 2007, but I was also there in 2009 when she lost the seat to Bill Knight, a one-hit wonder in Greensboro politics who rode in on anti-Obama backlash and then more or less disappeared from public life.

The election of Barack Obama irrevocably broke a lot of white people in this country. They’ll never get over it.

I bubbled the bourbon bottle one too many times the night he was elected in 2008, so seismic was the development. We ushered Kay Hagan, a Democrat from Greensboro, into the US Senate that night, too, knocking out Elizabeth Dole, who never really lived here anyway.

I was at her election-night watch party when Thom Tillis took her by surprise in 2014. It was like a movie, balloons slowly sinking to the floor as people made for the exits early.

I’ve no idea what to expect tonight. I don’t believe the polls and I don’t believe the pundits and I put my faith only in the news I get from reporters and outlets I trust.

It’s better this way, more exciting from a reporter’s standpoint, and in the unknowing, there is still a little room for hope.