The general election reminds me of a science lab we did in high school. We were supposed to use what we had learned in physics to build a ramp to accelerate a ball just so to fly into a trashcan 5 feet away. After about an hour struggling with calculus and physics, we set the ramp up just right, rolled the ball…and watched it soar off into the distance. The class slacker walked up to us, stared at the ramp for a moment, made one adjustment by intuition, and hit the mark on the first try. We threw our calculators at the wall.

Physics, political science, economics; all have these stories. We think we know all the variables, we have ideas that explain everything we’ve seen so far, and we run the experiment, we see the ball fall ten feet from the mark. Every election teaches us something new about how politics work, and disproves everything we think we already know. This week, we take in the results, feel the hurt, and learn something.

November 7, 1876
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes faces down Democrat Samuel Tilden in one of the most infamous elections in American history. Flagrant racism, fraud, and violence are perpetrated by both parties. 20 electoral votes remain in contest until two days before inauguration day, when a bipartisan commission awards Hayes a winning majority. The decision is supported by a series of backroom agreements that would be later known as the Compromise of 1877, or, alternatively, the Corrupt Bargain, informally ending Reconstruction and withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. Objectively, Hayes won the second-closest presidential election of all time (behind that of 2000). Subjectively, his narrow, contentious, fraudulent victory was the greatest single setback in civil rights history.
More than a year later, prosecutors continued to investigate the irregularities of the election. On January 30, 1878, the Washington Post reported hour-by-hour from Vernon Parish, Louisiana, where a group of men were accused of forging almost two hundred votes in favor of Hayes 15 months before. The Post’s opinion on the case was apparent in the title: “PRISON GATES AJAR- In Order that Anderson and His Pals May Walk In”.

November 9, 1952
While Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s defeat of Democrat Adlai Stevenson may have been predicted, the sheer magnitude of the victory surprised almost everyone. William S. White reports the cause for the New York Times: a party in the midst of a difficult transition from a mainstay of the conservative South to a party of the working-class North: “The always anomalous coalition of Southern planter and Detroit unionist having now collapsed with a loud and rending report, what is to take its place?” The incredible defeat forced the party to return to the drawing board, and complete the transition from the politics of Taft or Wilson to the modern party of Kennedy and Carter.

November 6, 1972
The day before the general election, noted economist Alfred Malabre argues in favor of Richard Nixon in the Wall Street Journal. While Nixon presided over a brief but hard recession during his first term, Malabre argues that the end of the massive inflation and overproduction of the last expansionary period benefitted the country, and led directly to the new expansion. He seems concerned that the public will fail to recognize this improvement in the economy, or Nixon’s part in it: “This happy prospect, ironically, would be out of the question if Mr. Nixon had tried to keep business spending at anything like the pace under way when he assumed office.” His essay condenses on two points: that Nixon’s efforts fundamentally improved the economy more than the public may realize, and that the winner of the ’72 election will take credit for the new expansion regardless of their actual policies.
The following day, Richard Nixon obliterated George McGovern at the polls. Two years later, his role in the economic recovery was overshadowed by the Watergate conspiracy, and he was driven from office. One year, new foreign steel industries and an OPEC oil embargo drove the country into the unprecedented combination of inflation and recession.

Political life is just that: a living thing, constantly changing. Nothing is assured until the last vote is counted; unpleasant surprises are endemic to the study. But each of these disasters revolutionized political thought. If great ideas are born with "Eureka!", then they mature with "%$#!"