Column: On election day eve, the optimism of ‘The West Wing’ will break your heart

In honor of its 25th anniversary (and seeking some political solace), I spent the last two months rewatching “The West Wing” in its seven-season entirety.

At least I thought I was rewatching. In its early years I was a devoted fan of the Josiah Bartlet administration and am on record as such. Yet as I made my way through the sixth and seventh seasons of the Emmy-winning NBC drama, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that I was watching these episodes for the first time. I have no memory of giving up on “The West Wing,” though when it began I had just had my first child and by the time it ended I had three. Something had to give and apparently that was it.

So there was joy in discovering “new” storylines, many of which revolved around the final months of Bartlet’s (Martin Sheen) presidency and the campaigns of Congressman Matt Santos (D-Texas), played by Jimmy Smits, and Sen. Arnold Vinick (R-Calif.), played by Alan Alda.

But there was much bitterness and sorrow too.

Imagine a world in which the two candidates for president of the United States both rigorously refuse to engage in negative campaigning. Who use their one debate to explain, in impassioned detail, their differing thoughts on tax policy and international leadership. Who, as the election comes down to Nevada and its electoral college votes, make it clear they will not get lawyers involved.

“I will be a winner or a loser,” Vinick says as political consultant Bruno Gianelli (Ron Silver), in Mephistophelean mode, tries to persuade him to demand a recount if he loses. “I won’t be a sore loser.”

In the other camp, campaign manager Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) tells Santos: “You take it to court, you’re the guy who screams at the ump because you don’t like the call at the plate. Nobody votes for that guy again.”

In 2006, when the episode premiered, these responses might have been read as a reference to the drawn-out, many-lawyers-involved Florida recount in 2000. Or they might simply have functioned as a convenient plot device on a long-running TV show.

Then President Trump filed multiple court cases in hopes of reversing his 2020 loss to former Vice President Joe Biden. And directed an armed mob to the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. And ginned up more false allegations of widespread voter fraud this time around, sparking fears of similar if not worse violence around the 2024 election. After all that, “The West Wing’s” nobility of purpose is enough to make one weep.

Even more copiously than when Barlet’s beloved assistant Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten) died.

“The West Wing” was always Aaron Sorkin’s highly romanticized, often preachy, deeply personal and (mostly) progressive vision of presidential politics. (Though after 25 years its often patronizing yet somehow self-congratulatory treatment of some of its female characters seems jarring.) The race to replace Bartlet, which began more than a year after Sorkin left the show, is no different. Santos appears to be a near-perfect man of the people, with a resolute voting record and skeleton-free closet. Vinick believes in tax cuts, small government and school vouchers, but he is beloved on both sides of the aisle and is such a liberal Republican that he is loudly pro-choice.

The Santos and Vinick campaigns’ notion of “attack ads” focuses on voting records, military service and Vinick’s support of nuclear power — not lies, conspiracy theories or ad hominem attacks. The dirtiest the campaign gets involves a leak that Santos’ running mate, former Bartlet Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), is struggling in debate prep (it turns out McGarry leaked the info himself) and an ad that mischaracterizes Santos’ position on abortion, which Vinick repeatedly demands be taken down.

Though the storylines echo voters’ spoken (if not actual) desire for elections to be about policy rather than mud-slinging, the civility of the Santos/Vinick campaign is so clearly aspirational it borders at times on the ridiculous: Only TV writers could believe that a single speech is capable of lifting a primary candidate from the brink of dropping out to winning the nomination.

But now those aspirations appear heart-breaking rather than absurd. For nearly a decade now, Donald Trump, sexual predator and now convicted felon, has trampled even the loosest definition of civility into the ground. Choosing invective over inspiration, he campaigns almost exclusively ongrievance, regularly saying and doing things that would have ended the campaign of any other candidate in American history before him.

It is not remotely partisan to say he has divided this country in a way no other modern party nominee has ever even attempted to do.

If the writers of “The West Wing” had created such a bogeyman, a Republican candidate who regularly mocked, belittled and physically threatened so many parts of the electorate, who based his campaign on the authoritarian premise that unless he wins, the election is a fraud, TV audiences, Republican and Democrat, would not just have stopped watching the show. They (myself included) would have boycotted the network.

Instead, they went the other way. Sure, there was tension when the election came down to the wire, but no one felt the future of democracy was at stake. Now my children, too young to remember when Barack Obama was elected, view “The West Wing” and the tone of the Santos/Vinick campaign not as progressive idealism but as full-blown fantasy. Trump has turned each of their first voting experiences into a fight not for the direction of the republic but for its survival.

There are many emotional moments in the final episodes of “The West Wing,” but given the stakes and realities of this election day, it’s not the end of Bartlet’s presidency or even the death of Leo McGarry — made requisite by Spencer’s own tragic death — that forces the viewer’s throat to close with real grief. It’s the scenes in which President-elect Santos reaches out to Vinick, asking him to become secretary of State. Not because Santos wants to check some bipartisan box but because he admires and values his former opponent and because he believes that, despite their disagreements, he and Vinick want the country to improve for all Americans.

What seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky in 2006 seems literally impossible in 2024. Never in recent memory have two presidential candidates and their supporters been so politically and existentially at odds.

You don’t have to be a “West Wing” fan to feel despair, to wonder how it came to this. And, more importantly, to worry — no matter who becomes the 47th president — about how on earth we’re going to fix it.