My kids' school is a polling place for our fairly active little corner of voting Virginia. I live in Northern Virginia, in the 'burbs. Admittedly, many of the outlying areas even in relatively progressive Northern Virginia are purple-to-red, but in the past, I've seen extremely encouraging voter turnout when I've gone to vote.
Not so today. Hardly anybody seems to be voting in today's primary.
So when I went to pick the kids up from school, I headed inside to cast my vote for the Democratic candidate for a Senate seat for Virginia coming up in 2006. I am, of course, a big fan of the Fighting Dems, so my vote was for Jim Webb.
When I went in to verify my address and presence on the voter rolls, one of the poll workers declared I was #37. "Does that mean I'm the thirty-seventh voter today?" I asked. "Yup," said the poll worker.
At 3 p.m., I was the thirty-seventh person in my precinct to cast a vote in the primary.
My neighborhood is comprised of probably, I dunno, unscientific guess would be six or seven hundred people of voting age. Our precinct is larger than my neighborhood, though, so there are probably two thousand people or more in the area who are of voting age. Just a rough guesstimate, but probably not terribly far off. And of all those people, I was only the thirty-seventh today to cast my vote.
In the past, for general elections, the voter turnout has seemed quite impressive. I've always had to wait in line (for the last presidential election, I was in the throes of the early stages of labor and went straight to the front of the very long line), parking has always been jammed, and I have never, ever just waltzed in and placed my vote in three minutes or less.
And that was just what happened today. In and out in under three minutes. No waiting. Nothing. And I was only the thirty-seventh person to vote today in my historically active precinct. Shameful! The poll workers said it had been slow today, as if that wasn't completely obvious from my low voter number mid-afternoon today. They encouraged me to go knock on doors, and when my neighbors get home from work this afternoon, I am going to harangue them to run up to the school and cast a vote before the polls close at 7 p.m.
Wes Clark supports Jim Webb. Markos supports Jim Webb. The netroots supports Jim Webb. And I support Jim Webb.
If you're a Virginian and you support Jim Webb, make sure you've voted in the primary today - less than three hours left before the polls close! - and if you've voted, make sure your neighbors have done so, too. Because if my unscientific analysis of voter turnout, based on the tumbleweeds rolling out of the school when I went to vote, is any indication of how things're going in the rest of Virginia, there's a very good chance that Jim Webb won't get a crack at running against master sycophant George Allen in the fall.
To quote Markos from this morning:
Harris Miller seems nice enough, but as a lobbyist (and one that gave extensively to Republicans), he's not exactly a great messenger on corruption and clean government issues.
I'll be blunt. If Harris Miller wins, there probably won't be much of a Senate race in Virginia in November. If Webb wins, this race will catapult to the top second-tier and could become a top-tier race before long.
If you want it to matter in the fall, get up right now and run, don't walk, to your polling place!