This Sunday, November 7, is the 10th anniversary of Election Night 2000.

On November 7, 2000, I had been living in my apartment for eight days. I had just moved to Jersey City after living in central New Jersey for about a year. Recently I’d started a one-year law clerkship in Newark, which meant that I could finally move back up to the northern New Jersey/New York City area. I really wanted to live within the five boroughs, but my job required me to remain a legal resident of New Jersey, so I decided to live as close to New York as I could. Jersey City seemed to be an up-and-coming place, so I decided to give it a try.

I was supposed to move into my apartment in September, but the apartment had been newly renovated and the inspections kept getting delayed. I was able to store my stuff there, but I wasn’t able to actually move into my apartment until the end of October.

As for the presidential election, the daily tracking polls had been swinging back and forth for days. For a while, Bush had maintained a small lead, but as Election Day approached, Gore seemed to be closing the gap. Commentators were saying this was going to be the closest election in ages. Nobody really knew what would happen. Some were saying that Bush could win the popular vote but still lose to Gore in the electoral college. Wouldn’t that be typical? Bush, the “popular” and “plain-spoken” candidate, could win the straightforward vote, but that sneaky, calculating Al Gore could wind up winning on a technicality.

As a state employee, I had Election Day off from work. As my co-clerk and I, both liberals, had left the office on Monday evening, we’d tried to bolster each other’s spirits. “I guess the next time I see you, on Wednesday, we’ll know what happened,” I said to her.

On Tuesday I woke up late and voted. (I must have filed my voter registration in advance.) I can’t remember what I did for most of the day — I probably did some unpacking.

That evening I had to attend a continuing legal education lecture until 8 or 9 p.m.; all licensed attorneys had to do this during their first two years of practice. I was really irritated to have it on election night, but I took my Walkman and a pair of headphones with me so I could listen to the early results during the lecture. (It was a big lecture hall with a few hundred people.) Afterwards, I took the PATH back to Jersey City, and as I came up out of the PATH station to walk home, I quickly put my Walkman back on. The conventional wisdom was that if Gore won Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, he had a good chance of winning the election; if he lost one of those three, Bush would probably win the election. The reporters on the radio were saying that Gore had won all three: Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As I continued walking home, a woman, who must have guessed what I was listening to, said to me, “What’s happening with the election?” I told her about Gore’s winning trifecta of states, and we were both happy.

When I got home I turned on NBC to watch Tom Brokaw, my news anchor of choice. I didn’t have a TV stand, so my TV rested on my desk chair while I sat on my couch and watched in my half-unpacked apartment.

And we know what happened over the course of the night, as the election entered the Twilight Zone: Florida taken from Gore, Bush declared the winner, Bush’s total narrowing, Florida retracted, Bush maintaining an infinitesimal lead in Florida as Gore begins to pile up a lead in the national popular vote, surprising the pundits. I stayed awake and watched it all, riveted to the TV until NBC’s coverage ended at 5:00 in the morning.

Ten years later… here we are.