With all this talk about the youth vote turning out for Obama, I thought I'd share a story from last night.
My kid sister is 23 yrs. old and voted for the first time ever. She lives in New Jersey, works as a dog groomer and has 2 little kids. She voted for Obama.
Her husband is a corrections officer and an Iraq War veteran. He was really torn about who to vote for but in the end voted for McCain because "his family always votes Republican." My sister was really upset about it and apprantely they had a few good arguments over the last few weeks.
But off they went to the polls yesterday together to cancel each others votes out (kids in tow).
So here is the really adorable part. Though we hadn't spoken much about the election I got a call from her last night at 10:35 pm EST. Her and her husband were apparently doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations and had figured out that the election was going to come down to California. So she called to ask me who I thought was going to win California. I had to re-assure her 4 or 5 times that Obama had a 100% chance of winning Cali. (and got quite a kick out of hearing her tell my bro-in-law that I was sure Obama would win) I told her to relax for a bit because in exactly 25 minutes every network was going to simultaneously announce that Barack Obama had just been elected as the 44th President of the Unites States of America.
The whole thing just put a big smile on my face....this is what democracy looks like. Two young kids, working hard and raising a family, participating in democracy for the first time....staying up late on election night and trying to guess who was going to win California. I'm really just so proud of both of them.