The Morning After

By NANCY GIBBS

Let's celebrate for just a moment, in the event we don't get another chance. The last time an incumbent President ran for re-election, in 1996, the mood was so droopy that Jay Leno described one debate as must-sleep TV. Even people who bothered to vote weren't sure it mattered much who won. But this campaign has turned out to be a passion play, with millions more people prepared to paper their yards with signs or make calls at night or write a check to a candidate for the first time ever or offer to drive an elderly neighbor to the polls. Given the questions on the table--war and peace, freedom and safety--it ought to be a relief to see so many Americans come out of their little gated tribal compounds and engage in the fateful debate, hand to hand, door to door.

But voters now are having to confront the prospect that this campaign, rare in its combination of passion and poison, may end neither quickly nor well. In the darkest vision, Nov. 2 will be a day of apocalypse, with battalions of volunteers, geeks, cops, feds and assorted party watchdogs guarding the polls; 20,000 lawyers riding into battle, brandishing suits challenging the results in half a dozen states; campaign war rooms spitting out charges of fraud and intimidation; and branches of government built to balance and cool one another instead starting to melt. The fact that the last presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court paved the way for more legal challenges, if not mischief, this time around. And Congress's effort to fix all the problems, the Help America Vote Act, may have only made them worse. (See following story.)

Four years ago, a constitutional crisis, bruising as it was, at least felt like a freak accident. If it happens again, it may feel like an assault. Each side has declared that the other will do anything to win, which means that if this race stays tight, whichever candidate loses is less likely to think that he was beaten than that he was robbed. Already the planes are fueled, the legal SWAT teams ready, the recount office spaces reserved and provisions made for staplers and coffeemakers in the event that Election Day does indeed become Election Month.

But as the armies line up to wait for their signal, a weary public watches the spectacle with a different emotion. If the pollsters are right, there is a mass of voters--off the media's radar because they seldom scream--who can live with either outcome but dread an Uncivil War. As the warnings of chaos grow more dire, they could be forgiven for caring less about who wins this election than about how he wins and when. A TIME poll finds that 48% of Americans believe that an illegitimate winner may prevail; 56% are ready to abolish the Electoral College. "A certain amount of shenanigans is standard. But it'd be really nice to know who the next President is by Thanksgiving," says Ted Jelen, chairman of the political-science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "I just don't see a gracious concession happening this time. This could get awfully ugly." Especially if institutions that are basically built on trust are infected with a sense that they don't work anymore. Then the necessary healing after any election gets only harder. "It's scary," Jelen concludes. "It scares the hell out of me."

Here in the last lap of campaign 2004, the days get long and the candidates hoarse, and every night is Halloween. By last week the Republicans were all but declaring that your children will die a gruesome death if John Kerry wins, and Kerry was warning that if you catch the flu, it's because George W. Bush screwed up your shot. Vice President Dick Cheney talked about the greater likelihood of a mushroom cloud over a U.S. city if Kerry is elected, inspiring the Boston Herald headline VOTE KERRY, GET NUKED, VEEP WARNS. Cheney's rival, John Edwards--who had suggested that among the stakes in this race was whether the lame would walk again--offered an alternative nightmare: "He can't even manage the flu-vaccine crisis," Edwards said of Bush. "How can we expect this President to deal with anthrax?" The Kerry campaign had been handing out rose-colored glasses to reporters to help them get a glimpse of the President's view of reality. At the same time, Kerry was lobbing charges more wildly than he had before, asserting that Bush has a secret plan to gut Social Security and revive the draft, which inspired Bush to accuse his rival of exploiting the politics of fear. The Democrats threw the charge right back when the Bush campaign launched the "Wolves" ad, which shows a pack prowling a forest like terrorists hunting their prey and implicitly suggests the country can't afford to choose Kerry under such threatening conditions.

Both camps are burning through money at the rate of $9 million a day now--and that's before you get to the independent 527 groups that have dumped an additional $386 million into the race. The largest single ad buy of the campaign comes from conservative Progress for America. It shows Bush comforting 16-year-old Ashley Faulkner, whose mother died on 9/11. As it happens, the spot was made by Larry McCarthy, who produced the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped the first President Bush bury Michael Dukakis under charges that he was soft on crime. If that is the iconic attack ad, this is the ultimate embrace--to remind voters of the protectiveness they cherished in the President after Sept. 11. The ad has been ready since July, but sponsors waited until the end to unveil it.

Most of the independent ads are not quite as uplifting. An ad from Operation Truth, a veterans' group, features a soldier talking about going to war in Iraq because of weapons that didn't exist, and it ends with him showing what's left of an arm that was blown off. Another Progress for America spot features pictures of Osama bin Laden and a band of fighters and asks, "Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?" Message makers on both sides say that in a race this tight, it takes extreme measures to break through. "I think it is probably more aggressive and more negative than any campaign I've seen for President," says Democratic adman Steve McMahon. "It's a little like trying to get through a wall of stone. You need something that's pretty tough."

So tens of thousands of flyers from the Republican National Committee arrive in mailboxes in Arkansas and West Virginia, warning that if Kerry becomes President, the Bible will be banned and men will marry each other. In Tennessee a flyer shows Bush as a Special Olympics sprinter and declares, "Voting for Bush is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded." That one was so ugly that Democrats not only denied spreading it but also accused Republicans of spreading it themselves to smear the Democrats. In southeastern Pennsylvania, Democrats complain about unsigned literature calling Bush "pro-family" and Kerry "pro-death."

Go to a battleground state, and you can practically skip from lawn sign to lawn sign without your feet ever touching the ground. But that just means the lawn-sign wars are raging after dark--swastikas painted on Bush's face, bullets shot through Kerry's, signs stolen and trashed and set on fire and mauled with a hatchet. Pennsylvania Democrats have reportedly been spreading itching powder on their signs to protect them from vandalism. In Oregon just about every last Kerry sign disappeared from Klamath County overnight. So now "I'm advising people to do with them like they do with their cats," says Ross Carroll, chairman of the county Democratic committee. "You bring it in at night and put it out in the morning."

If the ground war is a measure of democracy at its best, a million acts of persistence and persuasion, the underground war is democracy at its worst, designed not to express the will of the people but to subvert it. In one battleground state after another, accusations of dirty tricks are growing daily. Republicans focus on voter fraud and charge Democrats with rounding up homeless felons and plying them with drink to get them to register and vote, early and often. Democrats cry intimidation and argue that G.O.P. officials are trying to disenfranchise voters who oppose them. Both sides have plenty of ammunition and more than enough lawyers to go around.

While Republicans have generally been quieter in their efforts, they are primed for putting the voter rolls under a microscope. In Ohio, Republican Congressman Pat Tiberi complains that four counties have voter rolls with more names than there are voting-age residents in the county, according to the last Census. In one Ohio neighborhood, Mary Poppins, George Foreman and Michael Jordan all signed up to vote. The man who submitted their forms was allegedly paid for his efforts with crack cocaine from a woman volunteering for the N.A.A.C.P. National Voter Fund in Toledo.

Republicans in Wisconsin are using Freedom of Information Act requests to get names of newly registered voters and then conduct database searches on them. In Florida the G.O.P. is staffing all 6,700 precincts to monitor who is voting and under what circumstances. Among them will be Andrew Dill, 21, a University of Georgia student and president of the school's College Republicans. "We'll help to make sure names get checked off right," he says, "but we'll also be looking for things like bribes, busing people in with the promise of a meal." The G.O.P. slammed Florida Democrats and their supporters for filing nine lawsuits around the state challenging the interpretation of various election laws, on everything from where provisional ballots can be cast to kicking Ralph Nader off the ballot. "They're trying to create a scare, where people think, I don't know if my vote's going to count," says Reed Dickens, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign. "They're trying to create the impression of chaos. That's their strategy."

Or as the Democrats might put it, they are trying not to get caught off guard by assuming a system is fair when it might be stacked against them. Much of the Democrats' anger is focused on local Republican officials, whom they accuse of applying election laws in ways designed to limit Democratic turnout--like Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, who tried to reject tens of thousands of new registrations because they weren't printed on heavy enough paper. Around Scranton, Pa., the new G.O.P. majority on the county commission voted in mid-October to move 23 polling places, all of them in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. The stated rationale was that some were in dangerous locations, but other observers wondered why the commission members waited until this late to make that determination. Election officials rejected the moves.

Democrats cried foul in Nevada when a former employee of Sproul & Associates, hired by the Republican Party to gather voter-registration forms, claimed that those filled out by Democrats were being torn up. In Pennsylvania Democrats are so deeply suspicious of Republican tactics that they have kept secret the location of the Election Day staging grounds for a 527 organization called America Coming Together, supposedly because they fear that Republicans would slash their tires if they knew where it was. In Jefferson County, Colo., someone has been calling voters and warning them that it's too late to fill out their absentee ballots. A 66-page manual put out by the Democratic National Committee doesn't just warn of Republican intimidation tactics; it says "if no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike" by planting stories in the press in which minority leadership expresses "concern about the threat of intimidation tactics."

All of which suggests that if the election comes up a tie, the two campaigns will take no prisoners. The Democrats especially--convinced they were outmaneuvered, outlawyered and outhustled last time--say they are not going to let it happen again. There is a certain amount of pre-emptive psychological warfare going on. Large numbers of typically Democratic voters--as many as 63% of blacks, according to one poll--fear their vote won't be counted; the party is signaling that it will fight for their rights. An effort mounted by civil rights and civic organizations, Election Protection 2004, has put together a coalition of more than 100 groups, including People for the American Way, with 52 field offices and 38 legal-command centers ready to be up and running on Nov. 2. There will be 300 phone lines at its nerve center in Washington, given that the group plans to target 3,500 precincts (including more than 550 in Florida) with its 20,000 volunteers, including more than 5,000 lawyers.

The Republicans are more discreet about their plans, but they have $10 million in the bank for litigation and plenty of resources to bring to bear. "We're ready," says Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd. "But we're ready to have Election Day be over on Election Day." Adviser Karl Rove likes to describe the Democrats' preparations as "signs of defeatism." "They're looking for a legal coup d'etat," he says.

If it looks as though the race is deadlocked going into Nov. 2, the Kerry camp has made it clear that it will not repeat what it considers Al Gore's mistakes in 2000. Following the networks' calling Florida for Bush, Gore made a call and was on his way to his concession speech when campaign operative Michael Whouley realized the flaws in the vote counting and frantically called every campaign cell phone he could to stop Gore's motorcade and prevent his delivering a concession speech that night.

This time Whouley will be in charge of a boiler room tracking the vote count, and no one will concede anything if there are irregularities to be resolved. Around 1 p.m. he will be closely watching turnout in certain key precincts. If it's roughly like last time, the results will be close, but if turnout is high, that would suggest that all those newly registered voters are actually voting. After polls on the East Coast close, if exit polls and the precinct counts show one candidate winning in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida by a significant margin, we will probably know the winner that night, since even contested races in smaller states would not ultimately turn the outcome.

But if Bush wins Florida and Kerry Pennsylvania, as some now predict, this could get long. "Unless one wins decisively, no one is going to concede this thing until you see the results of the absentee voting," a senior Kerry aide says. It could take days to count all the absentee, provisional and military ballots, which will matter if the margin of victory is close in some electoral-rich states. That Kerry aide is laying odds: "By 3 a.m. on Nov. 3, I think there's a 60% chance we will know but a 40% chance we won't." And given their raw memories, "everyone will be cautious" this time, says Kerry adviser Tad Devine, who was one of Gore's consultants in 2000. Aides will make sure Kerry looks as if he is preparing for the presidency, something Gore didn't do but Bush did in 2000. Kerry aides leaked word last week that Jim Johnson, who headed the Democrats' vice-presidential search, would head the transition for Kerry and that transition-planning meetings were taking place.

And then there is the scenario in which every state produces a clear winner but the race is still not over. If Kerry wins the same states Gore won and manages to turn Nevada and New Hampshire blue, the electoral count will tie at 269 each. If Kerry wins Ohio and New Hampshire, which Bush won last time, but loses Wisconsin and New Mexico, which Gore won by only 366 votes, it's also a 269 tie. In that case, the election will head to the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a majority big enough to hang on to the White House for four more years.

No matter how Nov. 2 unfolds, it is clear that a certain portion of the public is not prepared to go quietly. Particularly on the left, there is an assumption that the only way Bush can win is by cheating, so the calls have gone out for a Day of Outrage on Nov. 3 for No Stolen Elections events around the country. Groups like Beyond Voting.org have called for "widespread noncooperation if Bush is elected, if the elections are canceled or if there is overt election fraud again." Seattle resident Nancie Kosnoff thinks a Bush victory is grounds for a mass boycott to shut down the economy and has been stocking her pantry in anticipation.

But you can also find folks like Laura Maychruk, owner of the Buzz Cafe in Oak Park, Ill., who is inviting patrons to an election-night gathering complete with food, music, a television set ... and a couple of therapists. "People are completely obsessed in Oak Park," she says. "I have two friends who are clinical therapists, and I asked them to come, just in case people are depressed. It's kind of a joke. But they can try and say something like 'Life will go on' or 'Get a grip.'" Joy Gardner, a self-described vibrational healer in Hawaii, has created a meditation that she plans to use in her weekly group sessions to relieve the stress from election anxiety. Randy Wheelock, who co-chairs the Clear Creek County Democratic Committee in Colorado, is thinking that whatever the outcome, maybe he should have a party. "I'll talk to the Republican chair and see what he thinks. I just think, Let's try to treat each other with a little respect after the election, shake hands and laugh it off."

That impulse reflects the widely shared sense that especially in a time of war, you want your home to be at peace, so it is natural to want this campaign to just go away. Because both sides focused heavily on their core supporters, the political divide widened rather than narrowed as the race went on. "You can win an election without the center," notes Republican political consultant Dan Schnur of California, "but it's impossible to govern that way. I don't know how any President, the day after the election, then reaches out to the 49% of the people he's been ignoring for the past six months."

It would be easy to have watched this race and conclude that no such center exists, but just about every survey shows otherwise. "This idea that people are going to warring camps--that's not happening," says Carroll Doherty, editor at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. There's a centrist position that large percentages of Americans hold on many issues: they want to attack the terrorists aggressively but also keep strong relations with other countries, oppose gay marriage but support equal rights for gays, want abortion legal but restricted and limited. While the electorate is polarized on the Iraq war, there is plenty of terrain on which to come together around issues that voters can do something about. "Locally, Democrats and Republicans have a lot in common," says Hank Mahoney, the Republican president of the local board of commissioners in Radnor Township, Pa. "We all want to keep taxes low, protect open space, pay the police and have the trash picked up."

So, with that in mind, here's one idea that sounds one campfire short of singing Kumbayah: a group called Let's Talk America, which trains people to hold bipartisan meetings in which they can exchange ideas in a benevolent environment, has decided to focus on cleaning up after this election. It plans to place Op-Ed pieces and radio commentaries encouraging citizens with diverse views to hold monthly Let's Talk America days in their living rooms and town halls. The move may come off as earnest now, but it may simply look sensible if Americans end up feeling bruised by an election turned legal train wreck. "For our system to work," argues Leon Panetta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff and now head of a nonpartisan public-policy think tank in California, "the right to vote is the fundamental power we have in a democratic society, and if people feel that, for whatever reason, their vote is not being counted, that's going to produce a helluva lot of anger, particularly if they don't like the result of an election."

If you're searching for a reason for hope, in case we run out soon, consider the wee hours of last Thursday morning in the Bronx after baseball's most bitter rivalry had finally played itself out. The riot police were at the ready as partisans of each side descended in red and blue waves on the venerable Yankee Tavern to carouse or console. And against all odds, the spirit was genial. Defeated Yankee fans bought Red Sox fans a drink--no gloating, no fighting, no riots, just a moment to capture the memory before they moved on. Reported by Perry Bacon Jr. with Kerry, Matthew Cooper, Viveca Novak and Eric Roston/Washington, Rita Healy/Denver, Elizabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco, Nathan Thornburgh/ Philadelphia, Leslie Whitaker/ Chicago and Stacy J. Willis/Las Vegas

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. with Kerry; Matthew Cooper; Viveca Novak; Eric Roston/Washington; Rita Healy/Denver; Elizabeth Kauffman/Nashville; Laura A. Locke/San Francisco; Nathan Thornburgh/ Philadelphia; Leslie Whitaker/ Chicago; Stacy J. Willis/Las Vegas