Remember the nail-biting tension of the 2020 election? Days stretched into weeks as votes trickled in, each new precinct update a potential turning point. The cable news giants - MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, CNN's John King, and Fox's Bill Hemmer - emerged as unlikely heroes, wielding their digital magic to transform raw data into captivating election maps.
These maps weren't just geographical representations; they were battlegrounds. Each county, a pixel in the grand digital tapestry, held the key to victory or defeat. Was Joe Biden's edge in Atlanta's Fulton County large enough to overcome Donald Trump's dominance in rural Cobb County? Would late-reporting Maricopa County, Arizona, tip the scales in Trump's favor? With the fate of the nation hanging by a thread, viewers eagerly awaited each map update, their anticipation as intense as generals waiting for news from the frontlines.
The enthrallment with election maps continued into the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs and the 2022 midterms, where razor-thin margins in both the House and Senate races kept the drama alive. The maps became hyper-detailed, capable of revealing not just broad trends, but potentially even the voting preferences of specific neighborhoods. Political junkies reveled in this granular analysis, dissecting the voting patterns of affluent, college-educated white Republicans in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, or deciphering the leanings of fifth-generation Scandinavian communities in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
But what of the 2024 primaries? Here's the surprising twist: the maps are taking an unexpected hiatus. Nikki Haley's recent campaign suspension, despite her Vermont win, highlights a stark reality - the upcoming primaries lack the competitive fire needed to ignite a map frenzy. Gone are the days of hour-long analyses dissecting the nuances of each precinct.
The vast computational power and mountains of historical election data that fueled the map mania are now rendered somewhat irrelevant. With no truly competitive races on the horizon, the thrill of the chase is gone. Political junkies will remain unfulfilled, yearning for the days of dissecting voting patterns in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The intricate dance between rural and urban voters, the nuances of educational background and ethnicity - all the elements that once provided hours of captivating analysis - will remain unexplored.
One can't help but feel a pang of sympathy for these map masters, armed with cutting-edge technology only to find themselves stranded on the shores of irrelevance. The difference between a heart-stopping election season and a snooze-fest is monumental. Election nights like 2000, with its constant twists and turns, offered an unparalleled level of suspense. In stark contrast, the Clinton-Dole election four years earlier was a monotonous affair, prompting CNN pollster Bill Schneider to liken it to observing the flatline of a patient's EEG.
Unless an unforeseen scenario unfolds at the conventions, we'll have to wait until the general election to witness the exciting return of those illuminated red and blue shapes dancing across our screens. As Sir Edward Grey famously said during World War I, "the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Similarly, we can paraphrase his words for the 2024 primaries: "The maps are going out all over America; we shall not have good reason to see them lit again until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November."
