Well, for my particular case, it turns out I shouldn't be running node as a super user for security reasons. I wanted it to be elevated to run on port 80, but it didn't need to be elevated to run on port 8000.
So I forwarded port 80 to port 8000, and now am running node on port 8000. It still works identically to how it did before.
The command that I used in particular to forward port 80 to 8000 is
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8000