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+[1]Daring Fireball
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+By John Gruber
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+How It Went
+
+Friday, 8 November 2024
+
+My mom died at the end of June this year.
+
+I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about
+a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I
+want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was
+78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was
+hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had
+collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was
+wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had
+ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim:
+months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably
+grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.
+
+Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you
+knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity,
+courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make
+the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good
+most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing
+up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but
+they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to
+eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was
+a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our
+family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her
+unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No
+suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a
+cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she
+died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved
+her and I miss her.
+
+Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.
+
+But my dad. My dad is 86, in exceptional good health, and he remains sharp.
+Until recently he not only played golf but walked the course, carrying his own
+clubs. He stopped playing golf last year, because — and I realized this only
+after my mom was hospitalized in May — he’d more and more been shouldering all
+of the responsibilities of daily life for the both of them. Even just nine
+holes of golf takes a few hours, and he didn’t want to leave her alone for that
+long a stretch of time, so he stopped playing. He still walks a mile or more a
+day, weather permitting. They were married 52 years and spent only a handful of
+nights apart in that entire span. They were in some ways an opposites-attract
+couple, but they were inseparable. They were good together. After accepting her
+cancer diagnosis, my mom was ready, I think, even for something as sudden as
+what happened to her at the end. My dad was not.
+
+But he’s an optimist at heart. You’d like him. I, of course, don’t know who you
+are, dear reader, but I know you’d like my dad, Bob Gruber, because everyone
+likes Bob Gruber. He can tell a good joke and he loves to tell them. There’s a
+quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that I was reminded of, just the other
+day, from of all things [12]a garbage can: “I don’t like that man. I must get
+to know him better.” I don’t share Lincoln’s
+there’s-something-to-like-about-everyone optimism about our fellow men, but my
+dad does.
+
+He’s been doing good, I think, these months since her passing. I talk to him
+almost every day. He’s naturally outgoing and still goes out. He’s got
+friends — which fact alone can be rare for an 86-year-old — and he sees them
+regularly. He attends mass frequently and takes tremendous solace in his faith.
+He misses my mom, his wife, desperately, but he puts on a good face. He gets
+sad and he admits he gets sad. But the very last thing he wants is for anyone,
+especially me or my sister, to worry about or even feel sorry for him. I’m like
+that. I get it. You often hear about old men who just shut down and fade away,
+rather quickly, after their wives die. My dad’s not shutting down.
+
+I thought of my dad this week when I watched [13]Harrison Ford’s gravelly
+endorsement of Kamala Harris, which he began thus: “Look, I’ve been voting for
+64 years. Never really wanted to talk about it very much.” My dad’s politics
+are like that. His religion is too. Strong beliefs that he doesn’t feel the
+need to broadcast or proselytize — and deep suspicion, bordering on contempt,
+regarding those who do. My dad is old and white and lives in a suburb in a red
+Pennsylvania county, but he is a lifelong Democrat. He can’t abide Fox News and
+never understood his age-group peers who succumbed to Rush Limbaugh’s daily
+siren call. His entire life he’s seen the Democrats as the party of and for the
+people. The party for working men and women. The party of equality and justice
+and minding your own goddamn business what people do in their private lives. He
+votes every election, even the odd years, when the only office on the ballot
+might be the borough tax collector or members of the school board. He rightly
+sees voting as a citizen’s civic duty. My dad is the most honest and
+trustworthy person I’ve ever known, or even imagined. If they ever somehow met,
+my dad and Joe Biden would become fast friends. They share a worldview, and
+grew up at the same time, in similar places, from similar means. They even both
+love trains. (My dad, though, thought Biden was too old to run again. “I know
+that walk,” he told me early this year, regarding Biden’s stiffening gait. He
+thought it was good, and noble, when Biden dropped out.) He despises Donald
+Trump and sees right through him.
+
+So, when my dad called me Tuesday morning, I thought it would be the election
+on his mind. It was all that was on my mind, that’s for sure. He had, in fact,
+just come back from voting, but it was something else. His voice was chipper,
+upbeat, but I could tell it wasn’t a good story. I know him too well.
+
+Turns out, he had gone out to eat, by himself, Monday evening. In fact, at the
+very same restaurant where he and my mom ate their last meal together. He ate,
+drove home, and once home went to wash his hands before going to bed. That’s
+when he noticed his wedding band was missing from his finger.
+
+It was lost.
+
+He looked around to no avail, and went to bed without it. In the morning light,
+he retraced his steps. He felt certain he had it on while at the
+restaurant — not because he took any note of it while dining, but because he
+knows he’d have noticed its absence. If you wear a ring every day on the same
+finger, you know how true that is. He almost never took that ring off.
+
+At some point when I was a little kid, my dad told me he had never once removed
+his ring since my mom put it on his finger at their wedding, the year before I
+was born. My mom, I knew, took hers on and off all the time. In fact she often
+wore other rings in place of her actual wedding band, because she found them
+more comfortable, and she placed little sentimental value on the ring from her
+actual ceremony. I asked my dad that day about his, and he told me he simply
+had never taken it off. I found that to be amazing. From my childhood
+perspective, he’d worn that ring nonstop for a lifetime. He broke that streak
+eventually, for some small reason, and it wasn’t a big deal to him, the
+never-having-taken-it-off thing. But I knew from that time I asked him about it
+as a child, that the ring itself was deeply important to him, in a way that my
+mom didn’t feel about hers. Some people imbue meaning and sentimental
+importance to certain objects. My dad saw his wedding ring like that. It was a
+sacred token. And now he’d lost it.
+
+Through my youth — his 30s and 40s and early 50s — my dad always looked how I’d
+describe as “of average build”. Neither thin nor heavy. Strong but not muscled.
+He looked like the sort of man who in his youth played third base, and batted
+near the top of the order, which he did. A former athlete who could still hit
+the living shit out of a golf ball. In his middle age, he gained a bit of a
+paunch. (It happens, I now know.) But in the last few years he’s lost quite a
+bit of weight. He’s downright bony now, in an old man way. His old pants (and
+nearly all his pants are old — he’s 86) need to be cinched with a belt or
+they’d fall right off him. His fingers too, have gotten bony. So his ring had
+gotten loose. He’d offhandedly mentioned that fact to me a few months ago even,
+telling me he needed to be careful whenever his hands might get wet.
+
+After waking Tuesday morning, he searched everywhere he could think it might
+be. The kitchen. The bathroom. The shower. The sink. The other sink. He took
+the couch cushions off. He looked in his car. He went back in the house and
+searched everywhere all over again. He took a break to vote, came home, and
+went back out and searched the car again, this time with a flashlight. To no
+avail. It’s a sick feeling after you’ve lost something of value, when you start
+losing count of how many times you’ve looked for it in the exact same places
+you’ve already checked. You can’t stop looking, but can’t think of new places
+to search.
+
+He called the restaurant, but they weren’t yet open, so he left a message,
+leaving his name and number in case anyone had found a simple well-worn gold
+wedding band — and if no one had, well, maybe could they keep an eye out for
+it. He called me after he left that message. He wasn’t forlorn. He laughed
+even. That’s how he is. That’s how I am. That’s how we are. I’m his boy, as he
+still sometimes reminds me. But I know what that ring meant to him.
+
+And my mom had just died so recently. It has only been a few months. The
+seasons have only changed once since we buried her.
+
+Fuck.
+
+It was a bad start to a day that I began, like any keen political junkie, with
+a nervous feeling. I’m not superstitious but a bad omen is a bad omen. You want
+every little thing to break right on a high-stress big day, and Election Day,
+for us, had begun with a small heartbreak. I told my wife about my dad’s ring
+and she almost burst into tears. She loves him so much. “He just lost your
+mom”, she said.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+You know how the rest of Election Day went. My wife and I voted. We both like
+the ceremony of voting in-person on Election Day. It helps that we live in a
+neighborhood with a vibrant civil infrastructure, with no-wait polling places
+no more than a block or two away from any residence. We were both feeling good.
+
+But then what? I was reminded, once again, that I never know what to do with
+myself on Election Day in a presidential election. No information or results
+can be gleaned until polling places start closing in early states at 7pm ET.
+What do you do until then? It seemed pointless for me to write anything further
+about the election, but equally futile to think I could concentrate on anything
+else. Expounding upon [14]Kottke’s treatise on the art of hypertext writing 
+[15]was a good distraction. I got to write about something I care about, and
+because the inspiration was the NYT editorial board’s [16]receipts-packed
+110-word admonition to end the Trump era, my effort felt at least tangentially
+related to the election that was then (and alas, remains now) front of mind for
+me. I could focus on that, and I didn’t finish it until just before 7:00pm.
+Perfect.
+
+That’s [17]Kornacki time. Steve Kornacki’s data-driven, map-based analysis has
+been the heart and soul of MSNBC’s presidential election night coverage for all
+three Trump elections: 2016, 2020, and now 2024. I honestly don’t remember how
+I watched election results before Kornacki. I know I’ve been watching election
+night results on TV since at least 1992. As best I can recall, before 2016, I’d
+flip around between CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks. I basically just
+“watched the news on TV”, not on any particular channel. But starting in 2016,
+we just watch Kornacki. We put on MSNBC and we don’t flip. The desk chatter
+amongst commentators and panelists that consumes the time between Kornacki
+updates is background noise. But what Kornacki does is genius. Maybe the other
+networks have caught up and do something similar now. I don’t know, because I
+no longer flip.
+
+The way it works is that every news operation has a “decision desk”. The
+decision desk staffers are off-screen analysts, not on-air talent. They call
+state-by-state results only with absolute certainty. That absolute certainty
+can and usually does come before every single vote in a state has been counted,
+but comes after the likely winner is ascertainable beyond a reasonable doubt.
+The decision desks make their calls not when the writing appears on the wall,
+but when the paint has started to dry.
+
+They weren’t always so fastidious, because nerve-rackingly close results in
+American presidential elections used to be the exception, not the norm. But
+after the contentious and almost impossibly close election of 2000, when, on
+election night, multiple networks — including Fox News — [18]had projected Al
+Gore the winner early in the evening, based on exit polls rather than tabulated
+votes, every such major decision desk has become quite rigorous about this,
+regardless of the political bent of the network or publication. Rigorous to the
+point of almost entirely avoiding controversy. We can see that even now, on
+Friday 8 November, as I write this. At the moment, none of the major decision
+desks have yet called Arizona or Nevada, despite it being a near-certainty
+Trump won both. The only exception I can recall was four years ago, [19]when
+Fox News called Arizona for Biden at midnight and the AP followed a few hours
+later. Biden did in fact win Arizona, but when Fox and the AP called it for
+him, with 80 percent of the state’s ballots counted, Biden was ahead by a
+seemingly comfortable 9 percent. By the time all ballots had been counted, days
+later, the margin had closed to a whisker-thin 0.3 percent. They were correct,
+but by their own standards of rigor were mistaken to call it when they did.
+It’s an interesting sign of how independent the Fox News decision desk is,
+though, that when they got reckless, it was in Biden’s direction.
+
+What Steve Kornacki does at MSNBC is make de facto calls without making actual
+calls. Or better put, he presents real-time data and context that allows you,
+the attentive viewer, to start making calls long before the decision desks
+reach their standards of absolute certainty. “You don’t need a weatherman to
+know which way the wind blows” goes the Bob Dylan line. Steve Kornacki isn’t
+the weatherman. He’s our finger in the air.
+
+What he does is find telltale counties in important states. A suburb of
+Atlanta. A suburb of Charlotte. A suburb of Philadelphia. With, say, half the
+vote counted, he might show that Harris is winning 75-25 in that county. That’s
+a solidly blue county. A 50-point margin is, you know, good. But then comes the
+context. That same county, let’s say, went 80-20 for Biden in 2020, and went
+75-25 for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now that 75-25 margin for Harris doesn’t
+look good. It looks like 2016, not like 2020. Or go the other way. Kornacki
+finds small rural counties of note. Some red county Trump was certain to win,
+but which he was winning this year by margins that looked like those in 2016,
+not 2020.
+
+It’s quite remarkable, Kornacki’s gift. He presents the story, the explanation
+of how the election results are going, without ever saying what exactly it is
+he is explaining. He shows you just the right trees to give you a sense of the
+entire forest. He never says “It looks like Trump is going to win North
+Carolina.” He simply presents facts, cold hard facts, that, if you consider
+them, explain why it looks like Trump is going to win North Carolina. They are
+conclusions left for you, the viewer, to draw. It’s incredibly disciplined. But
+he never ever gets ahead of the actual NBC News decision desk. He doesn’t have
+to. The way he does what he does, he can’t be wrong. If Kornacki paints a
+picture of live data and historical results that indicate that Trump is heading
+toward a win in, say, Georgia, hours before any official decision desk call is
+made, that’s because the data available up to that point just factually shows
+that Trump is on a path to win Georgia. And if something were to happen with
+the remaining votes that change that path, he’ll simply present that new data
+as it comes in, later in the evening.
+
+Closely watching Kornacki didn’t mean I knew Trump was going to win early in
+the evening. But it meant I knew it sure looked like he was going to. I was
+concerned when Florida’s results came in, shortly after their polls closed at
+8pm. (Say what you will about their debacle in 2000, but in the aftermath,
+Florida got its shit together and now tabulates the entirety of their statewide
+vote with remarkable alacrity and promptness.) I of course had no expectation
+that Harris might win Florida, but [20]she lost by 13 points. Trump only won
+Florida four years ago [21]by 3 points. That swing alone was an ominous early
+sign of the nationwide trend. That’s when the pit formed in my stomach. Uh-oh.
+
+I don’t flip channels but I do of course watch with my phone in hand. The New
+York Times’s infamous “needle” lurched sickeningly rightward early. I stopped
+looking at it, but not because I thought it was mistaken. Because I knew it was
+probably correct. By 10pm or so, it seemed obvious that Harris’s only plausible
+path to victory was for three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
+Wisconsin — to buck the nationwide trend of red counties getting redder, and
+blue counties getting slightly less blue. There was reason for hope, but not
+much. It was like “Tom Brady could lead the Patriots to a comeback in the Super
+Bowl even though they’re down 28-3 in the third quarter” hope. [22]That
+happened, but that’s not how 28-3 football games tend to go. That’s not how
+elections tend to go. And it’s not how this one went. At 11:20pm, my friend
+Taegan Goddard [23]wrote this lede in a post at Political Wire: “Donald Trump
+is now very likely to win re-election. He has the edge in Pennsylvania,
+Michigan and Wisconsin — all states Kamala Harris needs to win.” I wasn’t yet
+at the point where I’d have put that into such stark words, but I knew they
+were true. So it goes.
+
+I watched MSNBC for another hour, but only with resignation, not hope. I
+watched a Harris spokesman take the podium at her stage at Howard University
+and tell the nation she wouldn’t be speaking until Wednesday — just like 2016.
+I posted [24]one brief item here, commenting only, “Strong déjà vu as
+acceptance sets in.”
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+I woke early on Wednesday, at least by my night owl standards. A gut punch is
+not a sleep aid. My dad called, just after 9:30am. He seldom calls that early,
+knowing my sleep habits. I hadn’t stopped feeling heartsick about his ring. His
+voice though, was excited. He’d gone to mass that morning, driven home, and
+parked in front of his house. (Still hard for me not to call it their house.)
+Same exact spot where he’d parked the night he lost the ring. It’s a one-way
+street, and in front of his house, cars park on the left. He opened the car
+door and thought to look down, just in case. There it was. His ring. In the
+street, between his car and the curb, nestled amidst some dry leaves. It must
+have fallen off his finger as he was opening the car door that night, and the
+leaves perhaps deadened any clink it might have made hitting the ground. If
+that parking spot hadn’t been open again, he wouldn’t have found it then and
+there. If it had rained, it would have washed away.
+
+He said, “John, when I picked that ring up, I kissed it. 52 years I’ve had this
+ring on my finger. I thanked St. Anthony, and I thanked your mother. I think
+she found it for me.”
+
+Given the circumstances when I went to bed Tuesday night, it was no surprise I
+was welling up with tears come the morning. But I’d never have expected they’d
+be tears of joy, with a sense of hope — however diminished — and abiding love
+in my heart.
+
+Previous: [25]It Doesn’t End
+
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+References:
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+[1] https://daringfireball.net/
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+[12] https://www.threads.net/@gruber/post/DCDGU6bPsJm
+[13] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/04/harrison-ford-harris
+[14] https://kottke.org/24/11/the-powerful-density-of-hypertextual-writing
+[15] https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/kottke_on_the_art_and_power_of_hypertextual_writing
+[16] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/02/opinion/vote-harris-2024-election.html
+[17] https://www.vulture.com/article/steve-kornacki-2024-election-coverage-live-msnbc.html
+[18] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812854/the-florida-recount-of-2000-a-nightmare-that-goes-on-haunting
+[19] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936739072/ap-explains-calling-arizona-for-biden-early-before-it-got-very-close
+[20] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/florida-president-results
+[21] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/florida-president-results/
+[22] https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/02/06/super-bowl-51-falcons-patriots-comeback-overtime-peter-king-nfl
+[23] https://politicalwire.com/2024/11/05/where-the-race-stands-now/
+[24] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/06/overnight-status-check
+[25] https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/it_doesnt_end
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