A Tale of Two Elections

What does it mean that I went from gloating in 2004 to despairing in 2016?

The night of November 8, 2016 was momentous in American politics.

Many Americans found both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton distasteful and watched the election results unfold as one might watch bad reality TV (or a train wreck). As the results came in, equal numbers of voters were elated and devastated. I was among the latter — but I couldn’t help remembering how I had felt the exact opposite not too long before that.

Online and on my phone, people who voted for Trump crowed that it was finally their turn to win. I felt outrage at their callousness, their seeming inability to think that people were upset because they lost and not because they feared the harm that a Trump administration could do. But I also had the disorienting feeling that I knew exactly how those Republicans felt.

Twelve years earlier, in 2004, I had just moved to Seattle. Having been in the area for just three months, I was still trying out groups of friends, and I was invited to an election-results watch party at the home of a friend of an acquaintance. Since I didn’t want to go alone, I brought along a colleague with whom I had a lot in common.

The party was in a house up a steep hill (like seemingly every house in Seattle). Our host was welcoming and gregarious. He directed us to the kitchen for drinks and food, downstairs for the biggest TV screen, and out onto the deck for the hot tub, then left us to mingle. I felt intimidated by the other guests, who seemed to be “grown-ups” compared to my friend and me, who were newly minted college grads. I quickly realized that most of the guests, and certainly the loudest ones, were not only Democrats but seemed to assume everyone was.

I’m not sure which fact they would have found more shocking: that I had spent four years at a public university and never been to a house party, or that my friend and I had voted for George W. Bush. I kept both facts to myself, nursing one drink for the whole evening while everyone despaired, as Bush’s victory became apparent.

My 2004 self wouldn’t have believed my 2016 vote, either. In my sophomore year of college, I had met a new student at church who proudly announced that she was a member of the Young Democrats. My immediate reaction, which I thankfully kept to my thoughts, was total astonishment: “Can you be a Christian and a Democrat?” Yet in 2016, I enthusiastically voted Democrat.

How could it be that in just twelve years, under nearly identical circumstances, I’d changed from the one celebrating to the one despairing? I didn’t feel like a different person in 2016. I lived in the same city, a suburb of Seattle. I attended the same church, part of a denomination with “Evangelical” in its name. I’d gotten married and had kids, but I would have expected that to make me more conservative, not more liberal. Had the Republican party changed? Or was it I who’d changed? Was that from living on the so-called “Left Coast”? And if so, was I even still a Christian?

That’s what I’ll be exploring in this blog.

Keep reading here!

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