An elegy for the American election

6 min readNov 8, 2020

Meredith Walsh celebrates the victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. (Photo by AP/ Noah Berger)

Charles M. Sennott

— NOV 06, 2020

BOSTON — Like great American poetry, this election speaks directly to who we are, and we need to read every line and work hard to understand what’s written in between.

Each line of this American poetry of democracy has its own punctuation and rhythm and its own powerful truth. The cadence was as solid and hopeful as Robert Frost, as mournful and yearning as Langston Hughes and at some points as dark and self-destructive as Sylvia Plath. In the end, the stanzas of this historic 2020 presidential election had all the muscle and resilience, the promise and despair of our American story.

There was the poetry of patriotism muffled through protective masks amid the quiet toil of election officials and poll watchers, from both parties, who asked us all to be patient as they counted an historic voter turnout of more than 140 million voters who found their ways to the polls or mailed in their ballots under a dark cloud of a global pandemic

There was the poetry of defiance in the “good trouble,” as the late civil rights icon John Lewis would have called it, among the voters in the 5th Congressional District of Georgia, where Lewis served for 30 years before his death in July. It was Lewis’ district that proved to be the tipping point that put Biden in the lead in Georgia, which, if it survives a likely recount, will mark the first time in a generation the state has swung Democrat. That would give Lewis the last word in a running political feud with Trump that ran right up to his funeral.

There was rhyme that unfurled like a flag when Biden’s birthplace of Pennsylvania tipped in his favor due to mail-in ballots that washed in on the wave of COVID and that proved to be overwhelmingly in support of him. This was particularly true in the urban centers of his hometown of Scranton and in Philadelphia, yielding a surge ahead of Trump in the vote count and opening the path to the presidency through the 270 Electoral College votes Biden needed to claim victory. But even as Saturday would put that total of electoral votes to 279, as of 3:00 p.m. ET today, and the popular vote at an historic high of more than 80 million. Despite that mandate, the urban and rural divide evident in Pennsylvania and across the country is also fraught with meaning and presents an enormous challenge for Biden and for us all.

There was poetic justice in the hard work on voting rights in Georgia by Stacey Abrams, who lost the gubernatorial race in 2018 by slightly over 1% of the vote in an election marred by voter suppression efforts under the eye of the Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp who was not only the referee in this race, but also her opponent. Since then, Abrams has turned all of her efforts to expanding the vote especially for long-disenfranchised Black voters in the state, through her organization Fair Fight, as she shared with GroundTruth in this sweeping interview.

An elegy for the American election

Written by Miakholifa