The Golden State’s refusal to produce a final tally for a month is not an administrative failure but a deliberate aesthetic triumph in the tradition of slow cinema, one that uncultured political operatives are tragically trying to rush.
There is a pervasive, tragic vulgarity in the modern American electorate’s hunger for immediate narrative closure; it is a spiritual sickness that has now infected the Democratic party establishment as they stare, uncomprehending, at the sublime, unfolding tapestry of California’s post-election ballot tabulation. For weeks, party operatives have paced the halls of power in Washington, wringing their hands over the Golden State’s majestic refusal to declare a victor in key U.S. House races, entirely missing the point that the counting process is not an administrative backlog, but rather a towering achievement of durational performance art.
When state officials codified the generous ballot-access laws that permit mail-in votes to arrive a full week after Election Day, they were not merely adjusting logistical parameters; they were boldly rejecting the capitalist tyranny of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in favor of a sustained, atmospheric tension that echoes the grueling, real-time endurance of Tehching Hsieh’s obscure 1980 Time Clock Piece. The sheer, staggering scale of California guarantees that the tabulation will drag on through the dying of the season, forcing the viewer to confront the emptiness of their own political desires while refreshing a county registrar’s un-updated spreadsheet.
If we simply declared a winner on Tuesday night, we would be robbing the electorate of the profound, transformative melancholy that comes from staring at an unchanged forty-two-percent reporting graphic for six consecutive days.
To ask the poll workers of Riverside County to simply announce who will advance to the general election before the electorate has had time to truly inhabit the void of unknowing is an act of sheer critical violence. One might as well demand that the agonizing, unresolved silences of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard be suddenly punctuated by the explosive, nitrous-fueled gear shifts of Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—a crass capitulation to a philistine audience that has entirely forgotten how to sit with its own discomfort.
It is, of course, entirely predictable that the very Democrats who claim to champion the arts would so quickly abandon their aesthetic principles the moment control of Congress is on the line. They demand a climax where California has bravely offered them a mood; they beg for a protagonist to emerge from the gubernatorial primary, blind to the reality that the true protagonist of the California election is time itself, eroding our fragile certainties mailbag by mailbag until nothing remains but the quiet, devastating beauty of an incomplete data set.