"And on election night I'd go down to city hall in El Paso, Texas and cover the election. In those days, of course, we didn't have exit polls. You didn't know who had won the election until they actually counted the votes. I thought that was exciting too"
About this Quote
There is something almost tender in Donaldson's nostalgia for not knowing. He’s describing a kind of civic suspense that feels exotic now: election night as a public ritual, not a cable-news product. The scene is tactile and local - city hall in El Paso, reporters physically present, results emerging from counted ballots rather than predictive graphics. The excitement he names isn’t just about politics; it’s about process. Democracy, in this memory, is slow enough to be witnessed.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of what came later. “Of course” does a lot of work: it treats exit polls as an inevitability, a technological evolution that everyone is supposed to accept. Yet the payoff line, “I thought that was exciting too,” lands like a counterargument to modern certainty. Donaldson isn’t pining for ignorance; he’s defending the value of waiting, of letting outcomes be earned by counting rather than inferred by models and leaks. It’s an ethic of verification disguised as nostalgia.
Context matters: Donaldson came up in an era when broadcast authority depended on being there and getting it right, when a journalist’s credibility was built in smoke-filled rooms and municipal corridors, not on instant punditry. Read now, the quote becomes a subtle critique of our datafied politics: the way anticipation gets monetized, the way projections can preempt legitimacy, the way “calling it” replaces learning it. He frames the old method as thrilling because it made democracy feel real, fallible, and shared.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of what came later. “Of course” does a lot of work: it treats exit polls as an inevitability, a technological evolution that everyone is supposed to accept. Yet the payoff line, “I thought that was exciting too,” lands like a counterargument to modern certainty. Donaldson isn’t pining for ignorance; he’s defending the value of waiting, of letting outcomes be earned by counting rather than inferred by models and leaks. It’s an ethic of verification disguised as nostalgia.
Context matters: Donaldson came up in an era when broadcast authority depended on being there and getting it right, when a journalist’s credibility was built in smoke-filled rooms and municipal corridors, not on instant punditry. Read now, the quote becomes a subtle critique of our datafied politics: the way anticipation gets monetized, the way projections can preempt legitimacy, the way “calling it” replaces learning it. He frames the old method as thrilling because it made democracy feel real, fallible, and shared.
Quote Details
| Topic | Excitement |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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