PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—Let me take this opportunity to tell you about the three worst election nights of my life.

1) 2000 Presidential Election: This needs no explanation. The only good thing was Dan Rather's string of increasingly baroque metaphors.

2) 1976 Wisconsin Democratic Primary Election: I was a field organizer for the Mo Udall campaign. The weekend before the primary, Mo's brother, Stew, refused to authorize a mailing for the western part of the state, saying, according to witnesses, "You will not fasten upon my family the chains of bankruptcy!"

I went to bed at 3 a.m. with everyone having called the state in our favor. I woke up at about nine the next morning with Los Alamos of hangovers to discover that Jimmy Carter had beaten us by an eyelash, mostly because he carried the late-reporting counties in the western part of the state. Almost 25 years later, I went to a wedding and rode a bus with one of the strategists who sat in on that meeting. "Chains of bankruptcy," I said to him. "Shut up," he said to me. "You guys really should get over it," said my wife.

3) Midterm Elections, 1994: The Gingrich Revolution happens and, the very next day, I had to fly to Mississippi for a story. The local Republicans had their victory luncheon in my hotel. I took an aspirin and went to bed.

4) 1980 Presidential Election: I went to a party at a friend's house at which the host had laid in a couple of tons of lamejuns. We weren't an hour into the returns when a friend came upstairs with a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels, that he had bought at a liquor store a half-a-block away. As Ronald Reagan ran away with it, the Senate dominoes dropped one by one—Frank Church, Gaylord Nelson, Gaylord Nelson—mostly to non-entities. We all hung on to see whether Congressman John Brademas was re-elected. He was, but we were all pathetic.

Yeah, this is worse than all of them. Combined.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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