I was scanning Campaign Appearances this morning and saw that Palin was holding a rally at JR's Festival Lakes in Leesburg VA. I can almost see Festival Lakes from my house!
I've already voted early for Obama, but I thought it might be interesting to go stand among the Palinoids. Just to keep myself informed. Just to keep tabs on the enemy camp. Just for the adrenaline.
Leesburg (Loudoun County) is a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington DC. This county was once deeply rural and blood red. But with the influx of money and lots of educated people, the demo of this county has shifted dramatically to blue and has become essentially the most important swing county in arguably the most important swing state in the most important election in my life.
Loudoun County added to existing blue majorities in Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria to give Jim Webb a 9000 vote margin in 2006, giving Dems the slimmest of majorities in the Senate.
The Obama campaign also understands the importance of this region. So much so that Obama had a rally in Leesburg last Wednesday that drew over 35,000 on 2 days notice. Leesburg's population is only 28,000. Thousands were stuck in miles of traffic jams and never made it to the park or that number would have been much higher.
So, anyway, on 5 minutes notice, I grabbed a coat and drove about half a mile to the Palin rally and found a good parking spot just outside the gate. There was very light foot traffic and there were no lines for the metal detectors.
The only interesting thing about the rally was that there were so few people there! 2500 may be an overly generous number. And though this in no way resembles a scientific poll, and I don't want to say that some inexplicable episode of cosmic lameness won't allow McCain to pull this election out of his butt, but I think that these wildly disparate numbers between the Obama rally and the Palin rally in the very same town show that us folks up here in "communist country" will put Obama over the top in Virginia.