Split-party couples take election home

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WASHINGTON – In these households, it has crept out of the bedroom and slithered over the breakfast table, settled into the TV chair and filled the salon with its constant nattering.

Pity them, for they are the couples coping with chad.

Republicans who married Democrats.

“I think the election’s over,” Forrest Turner, a Republican of Santa Rosa, Calif., tells Sylvia, his wife of nearly 50 years.

“We have a conflict there,” she murmurs.

“For whatever crazy reasons, he is convinced Bush would do better,” Saphronia Young of Mount Holly, N.J., says of her husband, Miguel Jimenez.

“It’s a little odd for me,” Jimenez says of the morning-to-night discussions in the kitchen, in the car, over the phone – even via e-mail – about who, exactly, won.

All expressed relief that the courts appeared to be closer to pushing the saga to its close – even Democrats, who saw Gore’s chances thinning with each ruling.

“Sooner or later, one side will have to concede,” said Carron Shoffner, a Washington resident who admits she is “getting sick” of the daily back-and-forth with her Republican husband.

No major polltaker has ever canvassed split households – pollsters customarily confine surveys to a single person per household. But AP interviews with such couples across the country suggest the Election that Would Not Die has disrupted routines, regimens and relationship strategies.

And like any unwanted guest, it still elicits surprise, four weeks and counting into its stay.

For many of these couples, keeping politics out of the home has been a survival strategy.

“I soothingly read the Wall Street Journal op-ed page every morning, it takes all my angst out,” said Christopher Messina, an acknowledged Clinton hater in Brooklyn who lives with a Democrat. “And when I come home, I’m done talking about politics.”

But others are less able to resist the swells and swirls of postelection electioneering, even changing their patterns to accommodate the beast.

Bailey and Amanda Wood, both congressional aides in Washington, had an arrangement: keep politics in the office and out of the home.

Now Amanda – the Democrat – turns on the TV at 7 a.m. until she leaves, and keeps it on until about 10:30 p.m after she comes home.

“I usually go to another room,” he harrumphs.

“It’s exciting!” she protests.

Others speak of finding excuses to read, to iron, to fiddle with the car.

Josephine Higgins, the mayor of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., is a Democrat in a largely Republican family whose dinner table ribbing substantially increased after Nov. 8. She has retreated to the Constitution for solace.

“I think our forefathers were inspired,” she said, confessing to having stayed up until 1:30 a.m the night before, studying the document.

Avoiding political discussion at home is a long-standing tradition in some American households, according to Jeff Goldfarb, a sociologist at New York City’s New School University. It distinguishes this country from democracies in Europe and in Latin America, where politics around the dinner table is anything but taboo.

“In the rest of world, the state plays a much more important role in the individual’s life,” whereas here it has at existed at a polite remove from everyday living – until now, Goldfarb said.

“After this election, suddenly there’s a sense that one’s vote actually counts – and being perplexed about why it wasn’t counted,” he said.

It won’t last, according to pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

The recount saga has attracted such overwhelming attention, because “Unlike the election campaign, it’s very unscripted, open-ended, unclear in its ending,” Kohut said.

The sooner it ends, the better, the couples say – although they’ve discovered new things about each other that are, well, nice.

“We’ve softened each other up,” Bailey Wood tells his wife.

Forrest Turner found himself stirring to his wife’s defense during bridge games in their retirement community.

“The Republicans start getting verbal,” Sylvia said.

“She doesn’t want to cause a big stir, she’ll quiet up,” Forrest said – and that’s when he steps in.

In at least one case, the rapprochement reached beyond the grave.

Peg Hontz of Watsontown, Pa., said she couldn’t help but recall her 56-year marriage in which she and her husband, Robert, “canceled each other’s votes” – she a lifelong Republican, he a hardcore Democrat.

They hardly ever discussed politics, except when someone raised the Eisenhower-Stevenson race in 1952, when they made a pact not to vote – and then each broke it in secret. “That became the family joke.”

Robert died in 1998. Two years later, living in the house they built, watching the close race in a swing state, she couldn’t get him off her mind.

“I voted Gore, for him,” she said.