As the sun was setting at polling places around town, the mood was buoyant on Tuesday evening. Those walking
from their cars and heading into warm rooms to vote and those working the polls agreed that there was a mood of courtesy and conviviality in the air, with strangers exchanging smiles and making small, polite jokes.
Guess what? Americans like to vote. We enjoy the process. It feels good to participate in the traditions of democracy in an orderly fashion — no storming of buildings, no spewing of puerile insults, just the neighborly execution of our civic duty. Tuesday felt like a return to norms and normality, and that felt, well, good, if not historic. Unfortunately, based on official figures from the Suffolk County Board of Elections, voter turnout has been going down
slowly but steadily since the 1990s.
In 1997, for example, when Cathy Lester beat Thomas Knobel for supervisor, the total number of ballots cast in East Hampton Town was 7,415 out of 13,949 voters registered, a turnout of roughly 53 percent in an election with no governor’s race or presidential race. In November 1995, 56 percent of those eligible went to the polls. By contrast, on Tuesday, according to figures available on the Suffolk County elections website, 6,680 ballots were cast out of a
total 20,792 active registered voters in East Hampton, for a turnout of about 32.13 percent.
If you consider a willingness to get off your keister and go vote a measure of community feeling, or, in short, caring, no one in East Hampton should be patting themselves on the back. That said, a message was indubitably delivered by the voters of East Hampton this week and it reflected a mood across the nation. “Democrats Dominate on Election Day” was the morning-after headline from the A.P.
On the local level, J.P. Foster and Jeff Miller were good candidates and would have done a good job for East Hampton, but this wasn’t the moment to be on the Republican line. Voters appear to have voted a straight ticket here all the way, as a message of repudiation.
On a national level, the events over the past 10 years have been evidence of an impulse toward mayhem, a throwing over of tables. Perhaps the American public has had enough of extremism, of grossness, of A.I. memes in which the president of the United States visualizes himself defecating on an American city, of callousness toward the poor, and of the politics of vengeance. (Not to mention economic polarization, where a small group masquerades drunkenly as characters from “The Great Gatsby” and others are frantically watching TikTok for tips on how to stretch meals of potatoes to feed the family of kids.)
It seems to us that voters’ evident delight in disruption has tipped, over the last nine months, into fear at what our unleashed national id has wrought. On Tuesday, those smiles between strangers said: See? We are a good people, and we can treat each other with decency.