The dealings into presidential politics have begun, and Lord Knows they will be around for a while. And it all, eventually, plays into the local scene and its candidates. But with Biden now bolstered, it’s time to be over the top and report with satire the over-the-top. And this is just for starters, oh you politicos.

Its rare in this business that a deadline gets extended for days, with it being put upon by a reporter not an editor, but that’s what’s happened here following Tuesday’s elections. I decided days before, as the sheer volume of great information kept growing, that I would wait on reporting the Halloween party costume and decoration scene until after the national elections, which were generating several stories on the silliness in themselves and growing, and first deliver those tidings that amounted to The Current State Of The Country. Other topics that I will mix in, as pertinent, and Sometimes One Thing Leads to Another as they invoke past behavior, are who said what late on the campaign trail to lead to the result, the push for voter turnout that led to it all, and the status now of all those flags and signs that hawked one candidate or view, or another.
Then came the idea, unfolding very early in the week, that we might not know just who won the main office until the end of the week. So The Man With The Plan, that’s me, shelved himself. So literally, HudsonWiNightlife slept. As Jesus wept. OK, that’s too much.
But now, here-to-for, we can gun it. So here goes.
On Election Day I talked to my mom in Milwaukee, who said the idea being bantied about is that there would no way, no how be a winner known, before we got up from a late night’s election work with the Associated Press, on Wednesday as the lines even there were out the door and basically a block. So I checked out what the pundits were saying, and they agreed. All Around Wisconsin, a battle-ground state that proved not to be as much-so as say, Pennsylvania, it was said to be the same.
When I reported to the election headquarters for AP in my county, St. Croix, I was greeting for the second time around by a deputy who was actually civil and could laugh at a joke, unlike his years’ old counterpart who would rush you out the door moments after the final results came in, and you were still gathering your papers. The apparently now retired McGruff, who would show signs of physically nudging you along if you know what I mean, if you did not run fast enough, was backed by the county clerk and staff who always want to get the hell out of there after a long day of overtime, which used to be often well into the morning hours — so really, you can understand — before technology got much more sophisticated but not necessarily better. AP always had wanted to do a piece of such First Amendment obstruction, but with all the politically based articles that were out there to be done, it never quite rose to the surface of the story log.
Once inside, at the small room now specially reserved for press — awe that’s sweet — rather than the spacious County Board Room where they had often been joined by various politicos, I saw that my one colleague was gasp, not wearing a mask at all — as that was required if enforced before you even got past the deputy’s checkpoint. She was hoping to get out of there before the 1 a.m. benchmark where both our news agencies had set as when the bonus-round-time would kick in for pay.
It became clear that wasn’t likely. In the city of Hudson, not one of the first to send full results in, there were a full 5,000 absentee ballots filed, almost all the eligible voters and that obviously held things up. It seemed the bigger the municipality, the longer it took to quantify those last few votes. We saw coding of results that had never been there before, such as terms like under-reporting and over-reporting. The clerk tried to explain to us that some results were being posted before all absentees were in, just to move a process along, but she was having difficulty explaining a complex process that also included for accuracy sake, the twin concepts of some ballots voting for both for president candidates and some neither, much less the status of the handful of minor party reps.
Yet we were out of there just before 1 a.m. The total county turnout had been just under 60,000 — again virtually everyone who could vote did.
A quick check was made downtown before turning in for the night, and there were just a few sparse faces that weren’t well known — aside from a trio of on-duty or off-duty staffers — and not once did anyone mention that there was an election going on. One server said they were sorry that election tallies as they trickled in would not trump sports TV and the local sage who was on top of that, and I noted my AP connection. He said that might turn Dick’s into Richard’s. I said how about Dicky’s.
<<What then about the politics come Wednesday, now that I’m done digressing>>
Would we know more by the time the cocks crows, and it would indeed have to be twice? As far as the Biden ballots, and about which states it was enough to declare a winner by AP, on the road to an eventual overall winner, AP had electoral votes stuck at 246 for days (needing 270). Trump was frozen at 214, the agency said. Even after the ballots counted put Biden at just a bit over what was needed but only a bit, and he was then recognized as the winner, around noon on Saturday the AP call had him as high as 290.
In the Senate that day, the gridlock continued longer, with 31 of 35 races being called, and there was even more of a divide in the House races, as of Saturday afternoon.