By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My wife and I got an invitation four years ago to attend a presidential Election Night watch party at our friends’ home in Amarillo.

We arrived full of optimism that we would witness history, with the election of the first woman ever as president of the United States.

What occurred, as you know, wiped the smiles off our faces.

We won’t attend any watch parties this year. The COVID crisis has taken care of that bit of Election Night activity. We’ll stay home in Princeton and watch the returns as they unfold during the night.

Our interest in this election, though, far exceeds what we thought we felt in 2016. Why? Because the individual who won last time — and who had no business occupying the most exalted public office on Earth — has been a disaster … to borrow a term that Donald Trump likes using.

I remain baffled in the extreme at how Trump has managed to hang onto that base of voters who continue to cheer his lies, his feints, his bob-and-weave answers. They either are too ignorant to think for themselves or they know he’s lying but give him a pass because he, um, “is telling it like it is.”

I need to restate what I have said already throughout this election season: Joe Biden is not the guy I wanted initially to win the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. I had hoped for someone new, someone fresh and someone with an entirely different approach to governance.

Biden survived the sausage grinder of the Democratic primary. He withstood a grilling from his fellow Democrats. He survived the crucible and now is challenging the individual who I have deemed the most unfit, unqualified, undeserving individual ever elected to the nation’s highest office. Donald Trump fooled just enough of ’em to win the Electoral College vote in 2016.

We won’t gather with friends this year. We will be watching with even more intensity this year than we did the previous time.

Oh, how I yearn for a different outcome.