Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, and since tomorrow is Election Day, I’m going to start this post by begging everyone who hasn’t already voted early or by mail to vote in person tomorrow. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that this could be the most significant election of our lifetime.

My family wasn’t overtly political, but my parents were friends with several local elected officials who were Democrats and belonged to that party, despite the fact that our town was heavily Republican. My father was even appointed as town historian for a one year term thanks to those connections. Both parents voted in every election, even the very local ones held at odd times of the year. Shortly after my father was promoted and they moved to a new town, they were photographed at the polls and ended up with their picture in the newspaper.

1968 was the first year I was eligible to vote, since voting age back then was twenty-one. I was in college in Maine but still a resident of New York State. I have no specific memory of filling out or sending in an absentee ballot, but I must have. My folks would have made sure of it.

At that point, I wasn’t all that interested in elections, except to find a poster of a pregnant black woman wearing a political button reading “Nixon’s the One” (his campaign slogan) hilarious. Yes. I know. Tasteless. But that was about as nasty as the campaign got, although the criticism of vice-presidential candidate Ed Muskie for referring to our neighbors to the north as “Canucks” was way out of proportion to the seriousness of the “insult.”

1968, of course, was a year of protests. I was against the war in Vietnam, but I didn’t participate in any demonstrations. I did, however, manage to convince my father that those who did were not “communist dupes.” That I had friends who spent twelve hours on a bus with no bathroom to get to a major protest in Washington DC may have been what persuaded him to change his mind.

The closest I came to a student demonstration–Paris the previous summer when gendarmes blocked the street

There was no question about who I would vote for. Muskie was a Mainer who graduated from Bates, the same college where I was in my senior year. More importantly, I had often heard my father say that the only reason he didn’t vote for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man he admired tremendously, when he ran for President in 1952, was because Eisenhower had chosen Richard Nixon as his running mate.

On election night, my history professor invited students to his house to watch the results come in. My fiancé and I both attended. I don’t remember too much about that evening except that 1) we were served some really excellent hot chocolate and 2) no one even thought about questioning the outcome of the election. It was disappointing, but there was no reason to fear for the future of our country just because the Republicans won.

graduation the following spring–what innocents we were!

 Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.