I enjoyed the recent blue tsunami, especially the one contest that kept me up until the early hours of the next day.

While Democrats were romping to victory in most of the contests across the country, I was focused on the race in South Carolina's first district in the House of Representatives. The winner would be my next congresswoman, since I now live in Bluffton, SC. My representative for the last four years was Republican Nancy Mace, who, for a variety of reasons, was not up for re-election.

Instead, the GOP candidate was Jenny Costa Honeycutt, who, like Mrs. Mace, may have been a college homecoming queen. But I feared Mrs. Honeycutt would be another rubber stamp for Donald Trump. Still, I initially expected Mrs. Honeycutt would win.

BUT THEN I got my first look at the Democratic candidate — Nancy Lacore, a former 3-star Vice Admiral who led the Navy Reserve until last year when she was fired — for no stated reason — by Pete Hegseth, our inept, blowhard Secretary of Defense. I liked the way Mrs. Lacore introduced herself to voters via television commercials; she seemed tough and qualified for a spot in a branch of our government that has been a huge disappointment for the past two years. The fact she was a Democrat clinched my vote.

I probably wouldn't have gotten so emotionally involved in the outcome of her race if it weren't for asinine Republican attacks leveled against Ms. Lacore in commercials that flooded my television throughout October.

When it comes to television and commercials, my situation may be worse than most. I no longer subscribe to cable and do my viewing via Roku and several streaming channels. When my wife and I made the switch, we foolishly assumed we no longer would be seeing commercials.

BOTH OF US were surprised when the channel that emerged as our favorite was not Netflix, Hulu or HBO Max, but YouTube, which operates a lot like Google. If you want to see someone rant about Donald Trump, ugly football stadiums, over-priced fast food restaurants or the worst tourist attractions, you'll find such a person on YouTube. Turns out that on YouTube, anyone can have his or her own program about any subject — bad drivers, how to use an air fryer, old songs, cute pets, you name it. But all of their videos are preceded by at least two commercials.

If we were willing to spend more money, we probably could watch this channel commercial free, but the switch from cable was not as economical as we'd hoped, so to save some bucks, my wife and I decided to suck it up and endure YouTube commercials that pop up at the oddest times.

For example, if you watch a college football game on YouTube, you get a commercial on a split screen at precisely the wrong times — such as a fourth down and goal to go with just 12 seconds left in the game. At that point, only the audio from the commercial comes through. And unless you have a very large screen, it's hard to tell what is going on in the game that has been reduced to a small rectangle on the left half of your TV.

MOST OF the things we watch on YouTube are relatively short videos. We watch separately, by the way, because I tend to like political things such as Seth Meyers "A Closer Look" and and the anti-Trump comments from Ben Meiselas and David Pakman. I also enjoy The Beard (Adam Moran) conquering another ridiculous food challenge and carnage on the highway via "Idiots in Cars." During an hour of YouTube, I may watch eight or more such videos.

During the month of October nearly everything I watched was preceded by a Republican attack on Nancy Lacore, which meant I was hitting the mute button about ten times a day. I already knew the message: Mrs. Lacore couldn't be trusted because she was an outsider. Even worse, she was an outsider who was born in New York. She was too liberal and she'd raise taxes by $2,500 a year. She was the devil incarnate.

These anti-Lacore commercials were everywhere, even on the co-called "premium" channels. One program my wife and I watch together is "Dateline" on the Peacock Channel, for which we pay a monthly fee. "Dateline" has perhaps more commercial breaks than any other program on the air, and during October, at least two of those breaks were filled with an attack on the liberal outsider.

[NOTE: In 1990, the population of Bluffton, SC, was 738. Today the population is over 36,000. Almost all of us moved here from another state.]

This made me like her even more because I, too, am a native New Yorker and I like to think I was voting for someone who was as liberal as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom Mrs. Lacore compared in one of the commercials. (It puzzles me why so many people vilify AOC.)

THE ONLY thing I appreciated about the Republican's commercial blitz was it told me the party sensed Lacore had a chance of winning.

It pleases me no end that the Republican commercial blitz failed. At 2 o'clock in the morning on November 4, I knew Nancy Lacore had almost certainly eked out a win, giving South Carolina its second Democratic member of Congress (with the other five being Republicans who survived the election night massacre). Final results were delayed and it wasn't until Thursday that I knew for sure Mrs. Lacore had won. Congratulations, Mrs. Lacore, and I hope by the time you're sworn in that Pete Hegseth will be out of a job.

Also congratulations to Dr. Annie Andrews for her victory over Darline Graham in the South Carolina race for the U. S. Senate. Having the late Lindsey Graham as one of our senators was bad enough, but it became worse when Trump appointed Graham's unqualified sister to replace him.

One hopes this finally signals the beginning of the end for Trump and the ridiculous MAGA movement. Trump, always an embarrassment, is even more so the second time around. His obsession with his stupid ballroom is reason enough to have him committed to a loony bin.

STAYING UP late on election night is something I've been doing for 78 years. I was 10 years old when my parents let me stay up extra late so I could listen to radio coverage of the 1948 presidential race between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey.

A few weeks earlier, my mother had taken me to the Syracuse railroad station to see President Truman when he made a whistle-stop visit while he campaigned across the country by train.

My parents were diehard Democrats and I was indoctrinated at an early age. After seeing the president, I was so revved up that on election night, even after I was finally sent to bed, I couldn't sleep. My mother dropped in from time to time until God knows when to deliver the latest news.

That Truman had been president since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 didn't seem to matter in 1948. Nor did it seem to matter that Dewey, who was governor of New York, had already made an unsuccessful run for president when he lost to Roosevelt in 1944. Nonetheless, Truman was given no chance of defeating Dewey in 1948. The Chicago Daily Tribune even went to press on election night and its page one headline read, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN."

THAT WAS one of the most embarrassing — and famous — "Oops!" incidents in newspaper history. The next day, when it became clear Truman had won, I was the only one in my fifth grade class who celebrated. Not that my classmates wanted Dewey to win; they just didn't care one way or another.

Truman's victory encouraged my father to make a second run for mayor of our village, Solvay, New York. He'd run for mayor in 1945 and lost by a whopping 2-to-1 margin. He didn't think he'd win in 1949, but that year Solvay had its own blue wave and Buster Major was elected. He remained mayor for 12 years.

Presidential elections in 1952 and 1956 were one-sided in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, so there was no need to stay awake past my usual bedtime.

But in 1960, when I was a reporter at the Syracuse Herald-Journal, the presidential election seemed like a replay of 1948, only the opponents were John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I watched the television coverage until I could no longer keep my eyes open, but the matter wasn't settled until the next day. When we got the word, most of the reporters in the newsroom rejoiced, but the city editor and managing editor were greatly disappointed.

MY MOST memorable election night came in November, 1967. The reason? The Cleveland, Ohio, mayoral race. I was working and living 40 miles south in Akron, editing the Beacon-Journal's TV magazine and a member of the Akron chapter of the NAACP, rooting hard for Carl Stokes to become the first black mayor of a major American city.

(Today it's hard to believe Cleveland's population was once our eighth largest, but in the 1960s it had 876,050 residents. Now the city is number 53 on our population list with 363,608 residents.)

What really made that night memorable was when Stokes declared victory around midnight even though he was behind in the votes that had been counted. The reporters on whatever channel I was watching were stunned, but the Stokes camp was certain that when all of the votes were tallied, their man would win. And he did — by 1,600 votes.

ALSO memorable was the 2020 presidential election, which also kept me awake until the wee small hours of the day after. I've never despised any office holder as much as I despise Donald Trump, and the thought of him being re-elected made me made me a nervous wreck, especially since he was in the lead during prime time coverage of the election. But by 11 o'clock, the tide had turned and I was fairly certain Joe Biden would be the winner. By midnight I knew Biden's margin of victory would be significant.

Obviously, my greatest disappointment came four years later when Trump defeated Kamala Harris. I thought for sure she'd overtake him around midnight, but she didn't, and our second national nightmare began two months later. Since then Trump has proven even worse as president than I feared, and the 2026 midterm election indicates most Americans agree.

I certainly hope there's another blue tsunami in 2028 because if I'm still around, I'll be 90 years old and don't think I'll have the energy to stay up until 3 in the morning to find out who was elected president.

(If my crystal ball is correct, the winner will be Jon Ossoff, the relatively young Democratic Senator from Georgia.)