“From your mouth to God’s ear.”
My democrat counterpart poll observer—a lawyer—was responding to my prediction that Ohio’s so-called “anti-gerrymandering” Issue 1 would pass overwhelmingly.
He wanted that to happen. I didn’t, but I thought it would.
Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for him, I was wrong. By a lot.
The Ohio GOP had assigned me to observe voting on November 5 at a Lakewood, Ohio polling location where Joe Biden received 80 percent of the vote against Donald Trump in 2020. I know that statistic because I checked beforehand. As I explained to my democrat counterpart, I wanted to know what I was walking into.
During the day we had many conversations as we observed the uneventful proceedings. Our discussions were rational and respectful. I don’t think there was a single candidate or issue that we agreed about. I was clear that I wanted all of his candidates to lose. He was just as clear that he wanted mine to lose. We didn’t try to change each other’s minds.
But we agreed that whatever the outcome, we were going to wake up the next morning loving our children and grandchildren and moving forward with our lives.
We talked about previous elections and what might happen that night after the polls closed. And what might happen after that.
I told him that I voted for republican Bernie Moreno, who was running for the U.S. Senate against three-term incumbent Sherrod Brown because I wanted republicans to take control of the Senate. He wasn’t impressed by Moreno, whom he said he had met once during a business meeting, and he shared an amusing story about why.
I’ll leave the story between him and I. It was kind of silly. It made us both chuckle.
If Brown loses to Moreno after a long career in politics, I asked, do you think he’ll call it quits, or will he run in Ohio’s next senatorial election? The democrat observer shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t hazard a guess. But he hoped that decision would be unnecessary by the end of the night.
It wasn’t. Brown lost.
“As a gesture of bipartisanship, I ordered some crappy pizza, if you’re hungry,” my counterpart offered a couple hours into our shift. Before I drove to the polling location, I had reheated a couple slices that were left over from the night before, so I wasn’t hungry.
When the polls closed, and the four scanning machines rolled out their tallies, my counterpart attentively studied the presidential results on each tape and tried to do calculations in his head. Not to see who would win the precinct. We were in Lakewood, Ohio. The winner wasn’t in question. He wanted to see whether Kamala Harris would match Biden’s 80 percent from 2020.
She didn’t. But she came surprising close. She got 77.2 percent.
My counterpart wondered whether the difference between 2020 and 2024 could be extrapolated nationally to predict a winner.
After the ballots were taken out of the scanning machines and sent on their way to the county Board of Elections it was time to go home. We shook hands and thanked each other for the engaging conversation.
I don’t think we wished each other good luck on the results. I think we were both too honest to do that. But I think we each learned something from the other. More valuable, I would guess, than anything we could learn from the divisive “news” media.
By the time I went to bed, the results were generally in, and I was delighted beyond my expectations.
I’m pretty sure my counterpart wasn’t.
Just as I wasn’t four years ago. Or two years ago.
But he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who I would expect to see on TikTok the next day coming unglued and declaring America a misogynistic, racist country that had just elected a fascist felon who would cancel democracy on day one.
The same sun that rose up in the sky every morning for as long as I could remember ascended over both Strongsville and Lakewood the next day. When I woke up after a few hours of sleep I went about my business, knowing that I love my family and it was time to start the day.
I’ll bet my democrat counterpart did the same.
Follow me on social media:
