The satirical newspaper The Onion captured the situation November 7, 2012:
WASHINGTON—According to widespread reports, roughly 314 million Americans across the country have been left without any power following Tuesday’s devastating presidential election.
As many struggle to cope amidst the continued outage, experts have predicted that due to the severity of the presidential contest, which cut a wide swath of carnage throughout the entire United States, it’s very possible that power won’t be fully restored to the general public for at least another four years, if ever.
“By our estimates, power is out in roughly 150 million homes throughout the country, and many residents—especially the poor, the middle class, and ethnic minorities—will have no power for a long, long time,” said Cornell University political scientist Dr. Paul Kucharski, adding that the power infrastructure, which was originally put in place in 1789, has become increasingly problematic and unreliable over the past 200 years. “Given that we have an outdated system that is so prone to failure, an outage of this magnitude was inevitable.”
“At this point,” he continued, “with the number of citizens whose lives have been completely devastated by this election, I think it’s fairly clear that the whole system needs a complete overhaul.”