NOW THAT THE election of 2004 is said and done, the only comfort I can take from it is that it wasn’t up to me. This year, I and nearly everyone I know became more involved in politics than we have ever been, and it doesn’t seem to have mattered.

This summer the winds of change and optimism were blowing all around, and even the most apolitical among us felt a breeze; for my friends and me, however, it was more like a tropical storm. We spent weeks organizing a fundraiser that raised thousands of dollars for Kerry. When Michael Moore’s documentary came out, we stood outside theaters handing out flyers to the long lines of moviegoers. One rainy Saturday in August, we sat for hours on a bus for a chance to ring doorbells in a Philadelphia suburb.

With the coming of fall, other priorities may have cut into our schedules, but they could not dampen our zeal. Back at law school, I did research for the Kerry-Edwards legal team, while my friends continued to participate in voter registration drives and canvassing. We were constantly in contact, whether it was to trade encouraging new poll data from Ohio, discuss Kerry’s performance in the debates, or have a belly laugh over the latest “Bushism.”

In the days just before the election, the energy and optimism among my circle of newly minted political activists rose to a fever pitch, as we fanned out to the four corners of the electoral map from New Hampshire to New Mexico, from West Philly to North Miami. And like medieval astrologers, we watched the heavens for omens and portents of what was to come. Job numbers were down in Ohio. Rain was predicted for Election Day. The Boston Red Sox made a seemingly impossible comeback to win the World Series it was a sign.

The morning of November 2nd, I awoke at 4:30 in the morning and piled into a compact car full of fellow law students for a drive up to a polling place in Middle-of-Nowhere, New Hampshire. There, we worked until late evening, monitoring the balloting process and proudly telling ourselves we were ensuring that “every vote counted.”

Some of the voters are forever etched in my memory: The man who loudly announced that he was 56 years old, had never voted in his life, and was voting for Kerry on the advice of his teenage daughter. The muscular, tattoo-covered man in the “Proud to be an American” t-shirt, wearing sandals despite the New England chill, who looked at us and exclaimed, “You must be them lawyers!” The husband and wife with barely five teeth between them, who stood proudly by as their daughter cast the first ballot of her young life.

We returned home, exhausted, to watch the returns and to hope. But as the night wore on, it became clear that, so unlike the disastrous 2000 election, the problem was not that every vote wasn’t being counted. The problem was that they were and they were for the wrong candidate. As more of the map filled with an ominous red and even the most cautious reporters began to speak of a Bush victory, I remember commentator David Gergen remarking, “I teach students in a blue state, and I know that tomorrow young people will be wondering, my God, what do we have to do to win one of these?”

What do we have to do? We could not reach into the brains of the more than 59 million Americans who voted for Bush on November 2nd and re-arrange their synapses. We couldn’t make them prioritize the security of their jobs over their views on abortion. We couldn’t make them worry more about whether their young son will be sent to die in Iraq, and less about whether he will be taught the theory of evolution. And could we help it if, as their eyes glimpsed John Kerry’s name on the ballot, 59 million Americans had a mental image of two men in tuxedoes cutting a wedding cake?

I do not regret one minute of the time I spent knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, collecting checks in New York, or shepherding voters into orderly lines in New Hampshire. I desperately hope that young people like me who worked so hard and feel so disappointed will not use this one defeat as an excuse to slide back into apathy. For now, I intend to join the countless others doing some hard thinking about what it will take to turn at least one red state blue. And I will try to hold on to some of this summer’s optimism to sustain me through the long winter ahead.  et