BY SARAH BLASKEY, the Miami Herald
BY SARAH BLASKEY, Miami Herald
If Americans can agree on one thing despite their deeply divergent political views, it’s that the past three days since polls closed on Tuesday evening have felt like years.
People are sleeping fitfully, waking up at odd hours to turn on their TVs or check their Twitter feeds and obsessing over minute changes in the number of votes counted in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Text message groups that had long fallen dormant have been reignited with nervous check-ins from friends and family. Google searches for the term “election anxiety” have spiked, according to the search engine. And although probabilities have shifted from favoring President Donald Trump’s re-election to a Joe Biden victory, the stress has not yet lifted — not with the result still uncalled and continuing legal challenges likely.
If Americans can agree on one thing despite their deeply divergent political views, it’s that the past three days since polls closed on Tuesday evening have felt like years.
People are sleeping fitfully, waking up at odd hours to turn on their TVs or check their Twitter feeds and obsessing over minute changes in the number of votes counted in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Text message groups that had long fallen dormant have been reignited with nervous check-ins from friends and family. Google searches for the term “election anxiety” have spiked, according to the search engine. And although probabilities have shifted from favoring President Donald Trump’s re-election to a Joe Biden victory, the stress has not yet lifted — not with the result still uncalled and continuing legal challenges likely.
“How am I dealing with it? It’s difficult,” Bennett said. “Half I’m keeping an eye on what’s going on in the country. The other half I’m working.”
“I’ve been glued to the TV and my phone,” said South Florida Democratic activist and political consultantEvan Ross. “I’m following the smartest data people in the country and it’s making me feel better. I’ve been trying to simplify and relay information to friends and family so they can feel better.”
How to Cope With Election Agony
By Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic
“Idon’t feel like getting out of bed,” a friend texted me the morning after the 2016 election, so bereft was she at the outcome. Her disbelief was mixed with sadness, anger, and fear.
She had plentiful company in her misery. “‘Post-election Stress Disorder’ Sweeps the Nation,” PBS NewsHour reported. Within weeks of the election, “post-election anxiety and depression” had entered the mental-health lexicon, with some professionals offering treatments including cranial electrotherapy stimulation and aromatherapy.
I don’t know what treatments people ended up pursuing, or if they were effective. But I do know a therapy for post-election depression that beats them all: winning the next election. Millions of Americans are still waiting today to see if they will benefit from this therapy, as the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains in limbo—an excruciating uncertainty for our nation.
But even if Biden wins, and my friend’s unhappiness is cured, that will not mean suffering has ceased. It will simply have migrated to new sufferers on the other side. Some might argue that this is inevitable in a nation with a system of adversarial, competitive politics. Post-election suffering for the losers is just a cost of doing business, right?
Read: A cold war between red and blue America
Perhaps it is. But you don’t have to play that game. If your guy ends up losing, you can lessen your suffering with a few straightforward practices. And if your guy won, you have it within your power—if you so choose—to show grace and make things easier on your friends and neighbors who voted the other way, thus making American life a little better for all of us. As we nervously wait for the final result, it is worth making a happiness plan—for ourselves and others—in either contingency.
As election anxiety floods social media, so do the memes
“It’s a lot of young people very nervous about what’s happening and they’re trying to cope through jokes,” said first-time voter Riley Reed.
By Kalhan Rosenblatt, NBC News
As the presidential election results stretched into Thursday, the internet turned to memes to cope with the ambiguity surrounding the next president of the United States.
With the national spotlight on states such as Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania, where a winner had not been declared as of Thursday morning, memes about them had begun to make their way onto social media streams.
And many meme makers and young voters said they relied on those memes to make them laugh when their anxiety about the future of the nation was at an all-time high.
“We all know that once someone reaches 270, people are going to get combative, so we have this period where we’re in limbo where we can try to just find humor in it all to deal with feeling anxious,” first-time voter Niamh Harrop, 20, a student at the University of Central Florida, said.
On social media, people joked about the candidates’ responses to the results, mocked states that were taking the longest to finish counting ballots and relied on traditional formats to joke about how certain states had flipped since the 2016 election.
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Some memes, like those on TikTok, have been entirely unique to the election, while, in other cases, like those on Twitter, traditional meme formats have been used to express the turbulence of waiting for the results.
One example of a traditional meme format is the use of the “distracted boyfriend” to classify the election results. In one example, the “boyfriend” in “distracted boyfriend” is Michigan looking at Democratic nominee Joe Biden passing by, while President Donald Trump looks at the Michigan-boyfriend in disgust.
Another is the “woman yelling at cat” meme, which has been used to mock Trump’s tweets saying “stop the count.” In this example, Trump’s face is imposed on the yelling woman’s face, while in the frame in which the white cat would normally appear, Count von Count from “Sesame Street” appears.
Matt Schimkowitz, senior editor at Know Your Meme, said the post-Election Day internet feels like one big group chat, in which people are using memes to vent their anxieties about the future through humor.
“The internet has such a cynical and sarcastic sense of humor, things that would normally maybe be off-kilter in normal speech or wouldn’t seem as heightened in normal speech … so I think that a lot of people get out their frustration and anxiety and their general stress about not knowing what’s going on online,” he said.
On TikTok, the primary target of that anxiety has been Arizona and Nevada, where the national attention had turned Wednesday and Thursday as the world waited for the outcome of the election.
In one video, user @Nolan_Meister pretended to be all the states frantically tabulating vote counts intercut with him dancing in front of labels, some of which read, “Arizona,” and “Nevada,” and throwing mock ballots in the air. The video ends with @Nolan_Meister holding up a sign that says “We have no f-ing clue” under the label “Georgia.”
