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In Hell’s Kitchen, An Election Night Endurance Test

Times Square onlookers react to news that Donald Trump has just won Florida. Photo by Zach Williams.
Times Square onlookers react to news that Donald Trump has just won Florida. Photo by Zach Williams.

BY ZACH WILLIAMS | Hell’s Kitchen appeared to offer an escape as I pedaled south on Seventh Ave. on Election Day, Tues., Nov. 8, 2016.

Behind me were 18 months of presidential politics, and I was determined to ride out the remaining hours before the polls closed. One of the two most-disliked candidates in American history would become president. Eleven hundred hours of my life could have been better spent in the end.

There were hundreds of news articles and a dozen debates. Long nights waiting for primary results turned into early mornings consuming analysis, predictions and the judgments of people across the political spectrum — and this does not count the time spent arguing with friends and family on the phone, or perusing the latest outrages on social media. Hundreds of millions of other Americans went through the same experiences.

That energy had to go somewhere else. So I turned my Schwinn at W. 43rd St. and headed toward the Hudson.

And there they were in front of me, at least a few dozen of those voters. They lined up outside a polling station on W. 37th St. between Ninth and 10th Aves. I wanted to get away but I also did not want to be alone in confronting this year-and-a-half experience. The locals would know how to find my escape, so I hit the brakes and headed towards the door.

A man stops to take a photo in the early evening of a satirical sign outside Tout Va Bien on W. 51st St. (btw. Ninth & 10th Aves.) in the early evening on Tues., Nov. 8. Photo by Zach Williams.
A man stops to take a photo in the early evening of a satirical sign outside Tout Va Bien on W. 51st St. (btw. Ninth & 10th Aves.) in the early evening of Tues., Nov. 8. Photo by Zach Williams.

They too had spent a thousand-plus hours following the ups and downs of the election. Keith Albert reckoned that he could have powered four light bulbs for a couple months had all that electricity and greenhouse emissions not flowed to TVs, computers, and smartphones. I looked at him as he crossed the street and reconsidered whether I could simply turn off the urge for more.

This election was an endurance test, according to Penny Lane. Her fellow high school teachers had debated the election for countless hours around the lunch table. She wanted to see Clinton elected as the first female president. There was still more to consume before she could turn away. And she was not as convinced as some of her neighbors that Hillary Clinton was going to beat Trump.

“I’m going home and drinking wine and watching PBS every excruciating moment of it,” she said. “It’s not just a matter of energy. I feel terrified.”

I was not ready to give up on finding some peace in the emerging political storm. The residents of the West 30s had a good suggestion, so I moved north. At the bottom of a bottle I could find an escape.

Michael Touchard, the third generation owner of Tout Va Bien, said he aimed to serve supporters of all presidential candidates on Election Day with 30 extra bottles of liquor bought for the occasion. Photo by Zach Williams.
Michael Touchard, the third generation owner of Tout Va Bien, said he aimed to serve supporters of all presidential candidates on Election Day with 30 extra bottles of liquor bought for the occasion. Photo by Zach Williams.

A chalkboard outside Tout Va Bien, a French restaurant on W. 51st St. caught my eye. It offered a choice: I am “Republican, Democrat, Drinking wine.” The owner, Michael Touchard, came out and explained that on a day like this he had loaded up on 30 extra bottles of liquor, recognizing that the 2016 presidential election meant more, more, more.

“You can’t escape it,” he told me.

THE TIME OF RECKONING | The two campaigns faced off from their respective corners in Hell’s Kitchen, Trump Tower in the northeast and Javits Center in the southwest where the party was just getting started in anticipation of the first female president. The middle ground was Rudy’s, a bar near the intersection of W. 44th St. and Ninth Ave. I sat in the backyard and sipped on a Narragansett Beer and no one was talking about Trump or Clinton.

A young couple sat down across from me and they seemed friendly.

“Are you a fellow election refugee?” I asked.

They smiled meekly and continued talking with each other. Then there was a flash of light from an overhead projector and a face emerged on the wall behind me. I could sip a beer and smoke my cigarette, but the election had caught me again. The polls were now closing and the crowd began to grow as the networks called Kentucky, then Vermont, and the notion that this would be an early night dissipated as I headed out the door.

This was the time of reckoning. I heard “Trump” by the time I reached W. 42nd St. and I could see the cable news through the restaurant windows on W. 40th St. I could move around all I wanted, but the election was closing in as they called more states and Election Night became the horse race that the networks had wanted all along. Solace had become impossible but I could still find sympathy so I headed for the one place where the lights would attract a crowd like moths. The place where I wouldn’t need a smartphone to know what was happening. The lights of the city would brighten my mood, and, at the very least, I could better understand how to unplug from this election as soon a winner emerged. But I did not expect the scene I found at Times Square as the eleventh hour neared.

A French journalist works on an article as he waits for election results in Times Square on Tuesday night. Photo by Zach Williams.
A French journalist works on an article as he waits for election results in Times Square on Tuesday night. Photo by Zach Williams.

The networks had seized control of the crossroads of the world. ABC News set up a stage in the middle of the pedestrian plaza and police protected them with metal gates and automatic weapons. The eyes of a thousand people bounced between the television screens and their smartphones to find out more about whether Trump would win.

But no one had time for my troubles. This was New York City and the people of Clinton country had problems of their own. The hoped-for landside victory receded from possibility. The networks kept it close in their projections on the big screens, but the smartphones told a different story. Trump was up in Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

“Oh my god,” said a middle-aged woman a few feet away. Cheers went up when they announced that Clinton had won Oregon and Washington and the five electoral votes that New Mexico could muster.

“It’s like the band on the Titanic is playing their favorite song,” I said, because the unexpected was starting to come true.

WHITE KNUCKLING THE RED AND BLUE OF IT | The nuances of the Electoral College have been rather simple since the Blue States and the Red States aligned in the 2000 election. The Democrats had the West Coast, Northeast and Great Lakes and the Republicans got pretty much everything else. Florida and Ohio were the prizes and the GOP entered 2016 at a disadvantage.

Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, won 24 states but only 206 out of 538 electoral votes. If Donald Trump were to prevail four years later he would have to win states that Republicans had not carried in decades, places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a state he lost by 13% in the Republican primary in April.

A woman takes a photo to share on social media as TV networks call the swing state of Florida late Tuesday night. Photo by Zach Williams.
A woman takes a photo to share on social media, as TV networks call the swing state of Florida late Tuesday night. Photo by Zach Williams.

Summer 2016 did not treat his campaign kindly after the party conventions. His poll numbers fell after his public argument with the family of a deceased Iraq veteran. The controversies continued: ties with white nationalists, a proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States, Obama’s birth certificate, Trump University, tax returns, corporate bankruptcies and the allegations of sexual assault that pundits thought, yet again, meant the end to his chances at winning the White House.

Polls told a similar story. Hillary Clinton opened up a wide lead in October after weathering an FBI investigation into her emails and ongoing accusations that she was the socially-stilted candidate of a corrupt political establishment. Chatter spread on cable, social media and in the newspapers that despite her unpopularity she would win Republican strongholds like Arizona, Georgia and maybe even Texas.

She was up in all the polls when Election Day arrived. The New York Times gave her an 84 percent chance of victory and Penny Lane reckoned that she was voting because she did “not want a close election.”

Harlem resident and Trump supporter Hugo Lantigua engages in a heated discussion with a Hillary Clinton supporter on Tuesday night before the outcome of the election was clear. Photo by Zach Williams.
Harlem resident and Trump supporter Hugo Lantigua engages in a heated discussion with a Hillary Clinton supporter on Tuesday night before the outcome of the election was clear. Photo by Zach Williams.

SCREENING FOR ANSWERS | Times Square became silent and all of the network screens went to commercial. Florida had gone to Trump and Corey Allen was feeling good. The 33-year-old had invested so much personal energy in support of Trump, and now he had a chance to brag among a crowd that overwhelmingly favored Clinton. He taunted a Clinton supporter who did not know what he knew. Her whole campaign was just a front for a “New World Order” led by George Soros and the Rothchild family.

“When I wake up at two in the morning, I start thinking about it,” he said.

He did not follow the network news so much because he had InfoWars, a website created by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He rejoined his two friends who were waiting for screens to come back on, but they did not and the suspense continued. For Allen this was just further confirmation that Clinton would steal the race in the end.

Ten minutes passed and the network screens all remained off. A bar a few blocks away had a television screen and the pundits pointed at maps on-screen of voter turnout in precincts across the swing states. Customers sat on their stools, nursed their beers and awaited the final results. And depending on what happened, one side of the bar was going to be disappointed.

“It’s really 50-50 here,” explained the bartender of Blue Ruin at W. 40th and Ninth Ave.

“So this is the swing state of Blue Ruin?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.”

Customers at Blue Ruin, a bar near the intersection of W. 40th St. & Ninth Ave., react to Donald Trump's victory speech early in the morning on Wed., Nov. 9. Photo by Zach Williams.
Customers at Blue Ruin, a bar near the intersection of W. 40th St. & Ninth Ave., react to Donald Trump’s victory speech early in the morning on Wed., Nov. 9. Photo by Zach Williams.

The patrons sipped their beers as Clinton supporters left Javits Center for home. Then the dozen or so people who remained at the bar began reaching the bottom of their beers and the news flashed that the unexpected was coming. Hillary Clinton would concede the election to Donald Trump.

The bartended announced a non-partisan round of shots. “I mean it,” she said after a man by the pool table shouted “President Trump” with an uncertain amount of irony.

And then the man on the stool next to me put down his glass and looked at Trump on TV as he reveled in victory. He realized that Trump had made good on at least one campaign promise. He did not know if the wall would be built or Trump would round up all undocumented immigrants. The possibility that a President Trump would usher in a new era of prosperity by sheer will seemed remote. But after 17 months of campaigning, Trump had made good on something and the man to my left acknowledged that as he place both his elbows on the bar.

“He’s won so much I’m so sick of winning,” he said.