Track and Field
Election Days are long, especially when you’ve already voted. And waiting on the results may well be longer – days longer – so I’m getting some thoughts down before we get the final “final” results.
For thirty-five years I was the head boys track coach at the local high school. I know: it’s track, an “individual” sport. But they have team scores in the meets, and being part of a “team” makes athletes perform above themselves. Running “for themselves” is limited, running for the guy beside you, who has trained as hard as you have: that makes athletes “rise up” (I know – another Hamilton reference).
We would run eight or so Invitational meets a year. And in most of those, we put our best team together, put them on the track or in the field, and let them go. But for the Conference and District meets, we did a lot of “scouting” and preparation. We wanted to win, to be Champions, and we would not only put our best team forward, but in a way to maximize our scoring.
Score Sheet
So in the weeks before the meet I would put together a score sheet: us versus the rest of the Conference. I would match everyone up, event by event, and try to anticipate how we would score. There would be the “dream” meet, where everything went right. There would be the “normal” meet, where some things would go wrong, but we would be OK. And there was the “minimum” meet, the absolute worst we could do and still win the meet.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because winning sports contests and winning political campaigns are very similar. Take it from one who has done both. So I have my Joe Biden list, my “score sheet”. Instead of the different events, from the hundred to the mile to the pole vault to the discus, we have states. Each state is an individual contest: Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and all the rest. But all add up to the “team win”, or the Biden Presidency.
Election Day
And I spent Election Day, hoping for the “dream” election, where Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Ohio all go to Biden. For as long as I’ve been a Democrat (that’s at least sixty-one years) I’ve believed that if EVERYONE got to vote, Democrats would win. On Tuesday, it was time to put that to a test. Over one hundred million people voted, before even the day of the election. Estimates are that another sixty or seventy million more voted on the day. So if you believe that more votes helps Democrats – then it should be the “Dream” list.
But, in almost every Conference championship meet we ran, there were moments when it looked like the “dream” meet was out the window, and we were working on the “minimum” score. And in the past few days, there have been times when I started to think that way. Social media doesn’t help, panic is infective, and some of my Facebook “friends” are panicking. I’ve got as good or better information than they do, and I know better. But that doesn’t change my indigestion.
And, no matter how well we planned our strategies, there were those meets when things fell below the minimum. We didn’t plan on our star miler getting tripped in the race, we didn’t have a backup when our best 100-meter runner pulled a hamstring, and sometimes (though seldom) some other coach had a better “plan” than we did.
I didn’t feel that way on Election Day with the polls still open and voters lined up. We didn’t seem to need the minimums. We had the dream solution in sight. But then the votes started coming in.
What’s Left
The “dream” solution went out with Florida and North Carolina. It took a bigger hit here in Ohio. We found out something that I didn’t want to believe – that there are still many Americans who think that what Donald Trump represents is “good”. I wrote a whole essay on that, but I can’t print it. It’s too close to the “bone” of too many friends.
So now it’s Thursday morning, and the minimum list is the only one left: Arizona, Georgia, or Pennsylvania – and Nevada. That’s what our Presidency depends on. Biden can still win, but so can Trump.
I wadded up the checklist yesterday. I’ve got it memorized, along with the vote totals for each state.
Today we will know.
