midnight
Tens of thousands of our partizans , longing for an excuse for staying with us , returned cheering to the ranks -- enough of them in the doubtful states , we believed , to restore the floating vote to its usual balance of power . Each horse of my team had taken a turn at doing dangerous , even menacing , threshing about ; but both were now quietly pulling in the harness , Partizanship as docile as Plutocracy . The betting odds were six to five against us , but we of the `` inside '' began to plunge on Burbank and Howard . It was after midnight of election day before we knew the result , so close were the two most important doubtful states . Scarborough had swept the rural districts and the small towns . But we had beaten him in the cities where the machines and other purchasable organizations were powerful . His state gave him forty-two thousand plurality , Burbank carried his own state by less than ten thousand -- and in twenty-four years our majority there in presidential campaigns had never before been less than forty thousand .