My children are too young to remember a bad election for Democrats. My older son was just a toddler when returns from Ohio and Florida crushed Mommy’s hope based on the 2004 exit polls. He helped me deliver yard signs in 2006 and was pleased to know that Chet Culver did become governor. Two years ago, he understood that his parents were voting for Barack Obama and was starting to clue in that other people were making a different choice.

This year he and his younger brother started showing interest in the election during the spring. Normally, I don’t encourage my kids to be pessimistic about the future, but my older son (like many seven-year-olds) hates losing at anything, so I felt I needed to prepare him for the likely outcome.  

My children don’t understand what most public officials do or the difference between the legislative and executive branch. Their view of elections is dominated by the race that decides who will lead our country or our state.

They started asking questions during one of the Republican gubernatorial primary debates. Who are these people? They are running for governor against Chet Culver. Who are we voting for? Daddy and I will vote for Chet Culver, but other people will pick one of these men, probably the one with that mustache, to run against Culver. What’s his name? Terry Branstad. He used to be governor when I was a kid, and he wants to do that job again.

Like I said, I don’t usually tell my kids to expect the worst, but I didn’t want to set them up for a big disappointment either. Culver’s approval ratings were stuck in the 30s while multiple polls showed his leading challenger above 50 percent. After Branstad won the primary, I explained to my kids that he was probably going to get more votes than Culver, although we won’t know for sure until November.

Yard signs have always fascinated my kids. When we’d pass the Branstad ones in the car or while walking the dog, they would sometimes comment, “Those people are voting for Branstad. We’re voting for Culver.”

My not-quite five-year-old seemed mostly interested in the “how” of elections. How will they figure out who wins? People will mark their choice on a piece of paper, and they will count all those papers to add up the votes. How many votes? Thousands and thousands, maybe more than a million. How will they count so many votes? People will put their papers, which are called ballots, into machines, and those will count the votes for each person. In retrospect, I should have taken him down to the county auditor’s office to see the machines. He has asked many times how they could count so many votes.

My older son had more “why” questions. Why was Culver probably not going to win again? Why did some people want to vote for Branstad instead of Culver?

We listen to a lot of audio books, and one recording we love is The Moffats by Eleanor Estes. The book’s about a widow raising four children around 1940 in the fictional town of Cranbury, Connecticut. Economic difficulties affect many of the characters. The Moffats’ landlord is trying to sell the house they rent, because he needs the money, but not many people are buying homes, since “these are hard times.” Women are cutting back on having dressmakers hand-sew their clothes, which hurts Mrs. Moffat, the town’s leading seamstress. She barters sewing work for her children’s dance lessons and has to count every penny to afford enough food and coal.

I explained to my kids that these are hard times in Iowa and our country. When times are hard, a lot of people want to change who’s in charge, like the president or the governor. It might not be the governor’s fault that many people don’t have a job or enough money for the things they need, but voters usually want to change anyway. That’s why not just Culver, but a lot of Democrats are probably going to lose the elections.

As for why we were voting for Culver, I tried to keep it simple. Culver and Branstad have different ideas about what we should spend money on. Daddy and I like the way Culver has spent money, but other people think Branstad would make better choices. My children’s school participates in the preschool grant program, so it was easy for them to grasp that many kids wouldn’t be at their school without some help from the government. Culver wants to keep helping more kids go to preschool, but Branstad thinks we should spend less money on that.

In late October, I got a kick out of my seven-year-old’s indignant reaction to this Branstad television commercial: “He says he’s giving kids preschool! That’s what he’s taking away!”

I decided months ago not to complain to my kids that Republicans were lying about what Culver and other Democrats did. Frankly, I don’t want to teach them yet that you can win an election by getting lots of people to believe things that aren’t true (the so-called billion-dollar deficit and “heated sidewalks”). They can become cynical when they’re teenagers.

I also tried not to focus on whether most voters were making the right or wrong choice. No matter who wins, lots and lots of people are going to vote for each candidate. In some towns and neighborhoods people will mostly support Culver, while in other places people will mostly support Branstad. As it turned out, the kids’ school held its own governor’s election on November 2, and my older son was able to help count the votes cast by students and teachers. Culver in a landslide: 199 to 64!

On November 3, my older son asked who won the election soon after he woke up. He wasn’t pleased by the answer, but he took it well. I think it helped that he had been expecting Branstad to win. I mentioned that even though most of the Democrats Mommy and Daddy voted for lost, some of them won, like the top lawyer in Iowa and the person who goes to Washington to work for our area.

The judicial retention vote was probably the most disappointing result for me and my husband, but we didn’t have that conversation with our kids. I don’t think they even know what judges are. I figured, unless they hear about the “no” campaign and ask me about it, I’m not going to volunteer that lots of people want to fire good judges because they said some couples could get married. I don’t know whether dodging that issue was the right choice. I would be interested in hearing how other people talked with children about the retention elections.

Please share any comments related to explaining an election to children, or your own childhood memories of an election loss. My parents canceled out each other’s votes in almost every election, so there was always someone celebrating in our house.