Blue or Pink States

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Even when everything goes as planned, politics still happens in off years. Savage, the Maclean's writer, remembers 2005, when she was "seven months pregnant and flying in the back in a center seat in coach class on a flight from Washington to Sacramento to cover some Arnold Schwarzenegger story. And I thought my back was going to snap."

And let's not even discuss what happens if you work on elections overseas. Okay, let's discuss it.

Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster and strategist, successfully planned to have his second son in December 2000. "December is the ideal month," Brodnitz says, because elections are over.

But during his wife's pregnancy, Brodnitz was working in an Asian country that follows the parliamentary system. The election kept getting moved later and his wife kept getting bigger. Brodnitz traveled home to be with his wife at the end of her pregnancy and to witness the birth of his son. A few weeks later, he had to leave his newborn and get on a flight back to Asia.

Those whose babies have come in the midst of the cycle

tell fabulous stories. Mitch Bainwol, now CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, tells of running the 1994 reelection campaign for Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) and giving a quote over the phone to a reporter as his wife -- in labor in her hospital bed -- made a slashing motion across her throat.

"Gotta go," Bainwol remembers saying. Their second child was born about 10 minutes later, he says.

That baby, incidentally, was induced to come early. The due date was a few days after the 1994 election, and Bainwol's wife, a nurse, decided to have the baby a few days beforehand so Bainwol could be present for both the birth of his child and for the victory of his candidate.

Democratic operative Paul Begala and his wife did the same thing in July 2000, when they moved up the delivery date of their fourth son by a day so Begala could make it to the Republican convention, which he was covering as an analyst for CNN.

"We were never so fortunate in our timing," Begala says.

What of those who reject Washington's obeisance to the political cycle? Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Co., a Republican outfit, was married on the same night as the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2001, and had her twins shortly before Election Day 2004.