There is Not Enough Coffee and/or Booze in the World

This is the hard part.

First, you spend months ignoring the polls, because the election is just too far away for them to mean anything. And then you live and breathe the polls, because Election Day is coming up all-too-quickly. And you look at the headline numbers, and you dig through the crosstabs and the voter samples and you try and tease out the truth. “It’s got to be buried in there somewhere!”

And you start, after a while, thinking you’ve found at least part of a pony underneath all the horsecrap. You’re pretty sure you’ve got a handle on this thing, and you go into Election Day with a decent idea of How It Will All Go.

Then suddenly it’s Election Day and it hits you with full force that you really don’t know anything. It’s in the voters’ hands. They’ll do what they will, and no thousands of polls or multi-layered Excel spreadsheets can tell you what that is.

So you sit down. You turn on the TV. And you wait.

And you hope, win or lose, the damnable process is over the day it began.

That’s where I am right now. Where are you?