Election Day

The last one, I mean.

Folks, we’re in low-power / post-election mode, since I’ve decided to take a few days off with my family. As part of that, I went back to the days after the 2020 election to see what I wrote back then that might still be relevant today. (Spoiler alert: Relevant!)

Note: I’m writing this intro on Sunday, so I don’t know yet what will have happened on Tuesday …

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Actually, before we jump in — here are the final “Who are you voting for?” poll results from last week.

If you’d forced me to predict ahead of time, I would have guessed we’d have a small but solid victory for Harris among our readers: Maybe 53% to 47% in her favor over Trump.

Actual results, after 1,437 people voted, surprised me quite a bit:

• 68% for Harris

• 20% for Trump

• 4% for “other,” and

• 8% said they can’t vote in a U.S. election (tracks with our % of overseas subscribers).

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From Election Day 2020:

Today is Election Day. More than half of Americans say they expect today will be among the most stressful days in their entire lives, according to a new study.

This isn’t a scientific, double-blind, peer-reviewed study, so don’t quote it. But, I have to say, it feels about right.

I don’t have a lot to add that hasn’t already been said many other places about the election. It’s important. If you haven’t voted, and you’re among my American readers, I hope you’ll find the opportunity to do so today.

Even if you’re not in a swing state, there are other races on the ballot—and while the popular vote for president doesn’t have any legal effect, it’s still an opportunity to have your voice counted.

I’ll keep the rest of this quite short. Since Topic A is the election and Topic B is stress, I’ll focus on Topic B.

I’ve done several interviews about people who relocated during the pandemic. It won’t surprise you to hear that the focus is on those who moved from cities to more rural or vacation areas.

What did surprise me a bit, is the number of times I’ve heard some of these people use the same striking word as they described their new daily routines that makes the decision to move worthwhile.

The word is “awe,” as in, building walks or other encounters with nature into their days, so that they’re confronted with “awe.”

There’s science that says this makes sense. Two of my colleagues on Inc.com wrote about this: here and here.

From the day after Election Day 2020:

I took my own advice yesterday, and went looking for some “awe.” My daughter and I went to Eagle Rock Reservation in NJ, a 400-acre park not too far from where we live, overlooking New York City. Nice view. (Photo below; enable images if you can’t see it.)

Anyway, I feel like my general anxieties probably come through in most of my writing here. If you read this every day, you probably have a sense of where I’m coming from.

On Election Night in 1948, President Harry Truman went to bed without knowing whether he’d won. He ate a ham sandwich and drank a glass of buttermilk, and asked the Secret Service to wake him if anything big happened.

I find that really impressive. I barely slept last night.

But, this inconclusive, temporarily disputed result is better than the alternative. In fact, that’s the phrase I went with for the Inc.com article that many of you helped me with, where I’d been asked to come up with “perfect words” to say to a team the morning after the election. (Link.)

More than 50 of you offered suggestions, and they were really smart. I’ll include some of them below. As I thought it through, however, I kept thinking about a book I read long ago in a college philosophy class: A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls.

Rawls argued that if you were to design a society from scratch, and you wanted to do it fairly, you should design it without knowing what your role in the society would be.

So, if you were the one deciding how much a CEO should make compared to a janitor, for example, you should do it without knowing whether you were destined to be a CEO or a janitor, yourself.

(I’m probably butchering this, and since I have a diverse, widely read group of dedicated readers, I invite corrections from whichever of you, say, wrote your Ph.D. thesis on Rawls and Immanuel Kant.)

Anyway, the relevant point is that I was examining how a leader should talk to a team about the election, without actually knowing how the election went. It’s hard to do; even harder now I assume, since we still don’t know for sure.

Take care everyone. We’ll know eventually. No out-of-shape fistfights, please.

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Thanks for reading. Photo credit: Photo by Unsplash. We usually skip the “7 other things” during low power mode. See you in the comments, or when I get back home next week!