![]() Abroad, Boris Yeltsin was winning reelection as president of Russia Vladimir Putin was a relative unknown who had just moved to Moscow to assume the lofty position of deputy chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. A debate among economists was seriously focused on whether to eliminate the national debt entirely or keep it alive just for credit purposes. The economy was in the best shape in decades: a jobless rate of just 5 percent, inflation under 3 percent, real growth at a more or less steady 2.5 percent and a budget that was approaching balanced-and on a clear path to future surpluses of several hundred billion dollars. What was it about 1996? Start with the terrain. Search for memorable moments, a dramatic shift from one candidate to another, a history-changing result of the outcome, and you find yourself in a haystack where there is no needle. It is the campaign equivalent of Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” the eight-hour-long film of the unmoving Empire State Building, or the Christmas Yule Log video, or the line at the New York City Department of Motor Vehicles. By every reasonable measure, the election of 1996 stands alone as the least suspenseful, least intriguing, least consequential election of my lifetime, your lifetime, anybody’s lifetime. While there may be a platoon of contenders for the Most Important Election of Our Lives, there can be no doubt whatsoever about the prevailing contender for the Least Important. So if you’re feeling nostalgic for a time when it seemed like less was at stake, you may be mostly out of luck.Įxcept for one year. That was just 12 years after the New York Times called an 1856 election for the Pennsylvania Legislature “by all parties conceded the most important election that has been held since the organization of our Government.” Don’t look at the needle - just ignore her! She loves attention.Rewind the tape and you’ll hear Nancy Reagan in 1980 (“This is the most important election of my life … The outcome will affect the nation and the world”), Harry Truman in 1952 (“This is, my friends, the most important election in your lifetime,”), and even the Atlantic Monthly describing the 1868 Grant-Seymour race (“It would, indeed, be no exaggeration to say that it will be the most important election that Americans ever have known”). Regardless of the success of the needle’s behavioral reforms, I can think of numerous less stressful things a voter could do to pass the time while waiting for results (which, again, will likely take a while). These states are also possible bellwethers for the national result, sort of - if they are won by Joe Biden, he has likely won the entire election if Trump wins them, both candidates have a “realistic path,” according to the Times. That’s because those states break down their votes by voter method, enabling them to report quickly and efficiently. Though there’s no national needle, we will have three smaller-scale ones tracking results from Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. ![]() It follows that this cruel mistress should not be used to chart the results of an already heated election, during a pandemic, in which the labyrinthine election laws of multiple states means that some counts will likely not be completed for days. “The huge changes in voting by method + the limits of available data just make too risky to do responsibly.”Ĭohn seems to be responding to feedback that the dreaded needle made the incredibly stressful experience of watching the 2016 election even worse. ![]() ![]() “There will be no national needle,” he wrote. Polling guru Nate Cohn tweeted out the news on Monday evening with a caveat: The needle, which so traumatically tracked overwhelming odds in Hillary Clinton’s favor at the beginning of November 8, 2016, before switching sharply to Donald Trump, is back with a slight tweak. Yes, the New York Times election-forecast needle has returned. Did you just hear a sudden piercing scream? A horrifying gleeful cackle somewhere in the distance as the sun began to set (the sun sets at like 4 p.m.
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