Tomorrow we will witness a miracle.
The miracle won't be a Hillary Clinton victory. It won't be a win for Donald Trump. And, I'm sorry, Gary Johnson supporters, but don't get your hopes up either. The miracle doesn't have anything to do with the candidates themselves. It has everything to do with the people.
Deep in our rational minds, a voice tells us that our puny, individual vote does not matter. Local elections, after all, are rarely decided by a single vote, and national elections never are. Yet we vote anyway. We vote by the millions. This is nothing short of a miracle.
I'll never forget an elderly couple I saw enter a polling station where I was handing out campaign literature in 2012. The woman wore pearls, the man sported a cap that read "WWII Veteran," and they leaned against each other with such precariousness I thought they might collapse in on each other as they inched toward the doors. Thin translucent tubes snaked down the man's face to a pair of oxygen tanks wheeling along behind him. The two figures staggered through the red-white-and-blue-bedecked door; ten minutes later they made their tender journey back to the parking lot. I hope both of them are still around to make the same pilgrimage this year. Maybe someone else will witness the awe and glory of it.
Tuesday morning, thousands of Americans will rise early, wipe frost and fallen leaves from their windshields, drive to their neighborhood polling place, and huddle in a cold dark line before it opens at 6:00 a.m. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will mark their ballots with one hand and cradle a child with the other. Millions of young Americans will vote for the first time. Tens of millions of Americans will return to the polls once more.
And almost half of them will vote for someone you think would be disastrous for the country. There is a sense that most of us are not voting this year out of hope of what our nation could be, but out of fear of what it might become. Since when did voting become a matter of keeping the apocalypse at bay?
With the stakes seemingly so high, it becomes easy to distance oneself from the other side: "How could they…? What reasonable person would vote for…? Why are they ignoring…?" It is tempting to think that the other side is stupid, evil or simultaneously stupid and evil. But whoever becomes President will be President of all of us, not just of the voters who picked the winner.
No one captured what it meant to be President of all Americans better than Abraham Lincoln, who in the 703 words of his Second Inaugural Address outlined an expansive vision of national reconciliation. Lincoln could have channeled the spirit of vengeance, vowing to make the former Confederacy a new Carthage, to sow salt into the cotton fields. Instead, he had the audacity to suggest that even after a devastating war, Southerners were not all that different from the Northerners they had fought: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."
And then, in political language so kind and charitable it sounds quaint today, Lincoln uttered a sentence that would ring through the ages: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Nowhere in Lincoln's Second Inaugural does one find talk of political enemies as "deplorables." Even after the Confederates had seceded from the Union and waged a four-year war to maintain the institution of slavery, Lincoln did not believe that fellow Americans were beyond redemption. This year's election features a contest between a Wharton graduate and a Yale Law alumna, who despite their elite pedigrees—or perhaps because of them—possess not one whit of the wisdom of America's self-educated backwoods statesman. Yet one of them will be our next President, and both could stand to learn from what Lincoln meant by "malice toward none."
If elected, Donald Trump will have some reassuring to do. The markets will plunge; our NATO allies will grow skittish; protests will break out on campuses across the country. He will have to summon traits not often on display in his presidential campaign: grace, magnanimity, calm, focus, seriousness. Trump will need to begin cultivating relationships with Congressional leaders of both parties and start reaching out to world leaders uncertain of what to make of him.
Because expectations are so low, a hypothetical President Trump may have it easier than a President Clinton when it comes to governing. If Trump wins and turns out to be a statesman, he will be the greatest dissembler in Anglo-American politics since Shakespeare's Prince Hal: "By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; / And like bright metal on a sullen ground, / My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off. / I'll so offend, to make offence a skill; / Redeeming time when men think least I will."
A hypothetical President Clinton will also have her share of challenges. The presidency is not an institution well suited to her preferred degree of secrecy; after Watergate, Americans have come to expect a certain amount of transparency from our executive. Clinton will also have to appease a liberal Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic Party while also reaching across the aisle to Republicans to secure support for legislation. In the wake of the FBI’s on-again, off-again email investigation, Clinton will have to convince millions of Americans that her election was legitimate. Even then, she will be dogged by the inconvenient truth that she only won because she was not Trump.
After Election Day, we will not only have to reconcile ourselves to our new president, but also to each other. I hope we can put aside the language of enemies and will ourselves to become friends again. The great 20th-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's words resonate as well in this election as they did in his time: "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."
Tomorrow, more than 100 million Americans will vote, making choices they consider to be “virtuous acts” in the best interests of the country. That alone is a great miracle. If, after the election, we can forgive each other in the spirit of "malice toward none, charity for all," then that will constitute an even greater miracle.
Matthew T. King is a Trinity junior. His column, “at the water's edge,” runs on alternate Mondays.
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