...and vote for whoever paid for the ad on Nov. 3.
This Election Day isn’t the big quadrennial affair, when the presidential race brings out nearly two-thirds of voters. That was last year. You might remember it.
And it’s not what I always considered the best three-ring circus in the newspaper business, the election cycle in which we elect the full slate of nine Loudoun County supervisors, nine school board members, and all of our constitutional officers. It’s been two years since that humdinger, and we have to wait another two years to go through it again.
I have the utmost respect for those who seek higher office. Well, to be perfectly accurate, I have the utmost respect for some people who seek higher office, but I’ve met a few dim bulbs on the local campaign trail over the years. There was, for instance, the self-righteous candidate who looked me in the eye and assured me in a very professorial tone that elections “aren’t a popularity contest.” I was too stunned to respond.
Once upon a time, the Board of Supervisors meeting room in Leesburg on local election night was the place to be. When the polls would close, many of the candidates, the activists who had spent the day scrapping for votes, every reporter in the county and a surprisingly large number of assorted political junkies would crowd into the room to await the results, which were phoned in to members of the Loudoun County Electoral Board.
It was something like being on the deck of the Titanic. All of the campaign people knew that a few of them would walk out winners, and a few of them would go back to four more years on their day jobs, but nobody knew which way the ax would fall. Considering the way these people had put out their necks on television, radio and newspapers during the months preceding the election, there may be a better analogy: waiting for those results was like attending a public execution, with the name of the condemned not released until every alleged criminal had gathered ‘round the guillotine.
Some of the greatest places to get people to open up for interviews are the smoking areas just outside public buildings, and that was always true at the County Government Building in Leesburg. I suppose it has something to do with them enjoying a few relaxed moments in the midst of their hectic day, but I think it may also be the submerged anger smokers feel at being sent to the proverbial woodshed every time their nervous system demands another dose. In any case, I heard more about the inner workings of Loudoun County government and politics while shivering with the smokers outside the Government Center than you’d think possible.
But I learned something on my first election night that helped me even more: some people really like to talk to reporters after they’ve, shall we say, imbibed. Tippled. Quaffed.
I was naïve enough to be surprised at the amount of drinking that goes on during election night. Not by the candidates, who are probably too nervous to stomach the stuff and who don’t want to be red-faced, sweaty and slurring when they give their victory speeches in front of 300 supporters and all the local news cameras. But the political activists who came flooding in to watch the returns weren’t stumbling just because they were tired after 14 hours bringing out the vote. After ninety long days of accusing your opponent of moral turpitude, corporate malfeasance and downright wishy-washiness, everybody deserves to throw a few back on the way to the execution, right?
But this Election Day won’t be that Election Day. This is the year of Virginia’s statewide election cycle, with Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General and House of Delegates races on the ballot. For a local reporter, this is the "dull sister" of elections. The candidates for higher office tend to be a very sober bunch, rhetoric-wise and tipple-wise. The delegate races can be nasty little things, but for me, knowing that the winners will do all of their work in chambers in Richmond, far away from my prying eyes and wandering mind, has always taken some of the spice out of this election cycle.
Every vote counts, of course – after all, this isn’t Florida – but it might inspire a few more of us to take the time to go to the polls if we keep in mind that Northern Virginia continues to grow more politically powerful with every passing year. Our burgeoning population appears to have finally given us the clout to neutralize, at least, and sometimes overwhelm what has for decades been the election day dominance of southern and western Virginia in statewide races.
So don’t waste your extra powerful Northern Virginia vote this year. Get out there and flex it.
I’ll be voting. I always vote. Sometimes you get free cookies.
And I’ll be looking forward to next year, when we get to vote for some of the bigger offices. I have it on good authority that Frank Wolf will be seeking another term in Congress, despite some whispered rumors to the contrary. And the year after that comes the big kahuna – the greatest show on earth – the barrel of rabid monkeys with a cherry on top: the stampede to the Government Center. If your next door neighbor suddenly decides to move into a new house two miles down the road, you can assume he’s switching districts in preparation for that death match.
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