7:30am First pot of coffee of the day brewed! We are checking out the morning TV news, for the first time in memory, to see how long the lines are in Virginia. Not too long, and we catch one really happy looking black guy about our age coming out of the polls and waving to the news cameras. It’s on!
8:30am I go over to our polling place to check out the length of the line (still inside the building) and to talk to the folks in charge about bringing over some coffee for the voters. I get the all clear and come back home to make it in a pot I borrowed from the Women’s Club, with a little help from the interwebs.
9:30am The coffee finally finishes percolating and I take it over to the school with some cups. The line is small now, just inside the main room. Realizing that I don’t have anything to offer folks with this coffee, I head to the grocery store, to pick up some fake creamer, sugar packets, and more cups.
10:30am When I get back to the school — with day old donuts in tow! — the line is again stretching outside. I am heartened to see that the Obama volunteers are still outside: if they are at our polling place in Prince George’s County, Maryland, they are truly everywhere. Once inside, I relocate the coffee station to the hallway from right beside where you check in, figuring there would be more takers farther back in the line. Former mayor and current Town Council member Margaret Mallino happened to be in line just then, and graciously agreed to pose for a shot near my new coffee station.
11am Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’m finally mixing up the cookie dough I didn’t get to last night. It’ll go into the fridge to chill while I shower (!) and then into the oven and it’s off to Virginia for the afternoon. Somewhere in there a lunch consisting of something other than day old donuts will get consumed. Depending on demand, I may perk another pot of coffee at the school for the post-lunch crowd before heading out.
1:30pm A guy I went to junior high with, who now lives in Florida and I’ll refer to as Rainbow941, sent me his analysis while I was in the kitchen making Pumpkin Cookies For Obama: “This is the classic mismatch. Horrible economy, stagnant war bleeding the country dry, old out of touch candidate versus the new, free- thinking, idiologically super hot liberal. GAME OVER.” With which I tend to agree; a similar analysis led me to observe to my partner last week that I could ‘totally see’ why voters elected FDR over and over and over until he died. Which reminds me to share with you where the voting populous was with regard to this very matchup two years ago (no wonder McCain always looked like a pole was jammed somewhere unpleasant during joint appearances). I will feel sorry for the old dude and his dramatic decline at exactly 1:59am this evening, or whenever we get the Alaska results, whichever comes later.
2:30pm It’s now raining, lightly but steadily, and is predicted to keep doing so all night. I am heading to Virginia for the next few hours, to do whatever I can to support the voters and Obama volunteers. Here’s what you can do for me (and Barack Obama!) while I’m gone: (1) Live somewhere warm? (Arizona, Florida, New Mexico!) Buy a 24 pack of water bottles at your local store and drive it to your local polling place; (2) Live somewhere cold? (Colorado, Montana, Pennsylvania!) Buy a gallon of coffee at your local Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks and drive it to your local polling place; (3) Live somewhere rainy? (Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina!) Buy a few cheap umbrellas and drop them off at your local polling place; (4) Got more time than money? Stop by your local GOTV office and help them with whatever they’re doing; (5) Got more free minutes than time or money? Call voters from your own phone; and (6) Do all of this in the evening after work! Lines are going to be long well after the polls close, and poll workers — your neighbors who will have all been there since an hour before the polls opened this morning — and voters alike will thank you.
3:15pm Traffic is slow as I approach ‘that damn drawbridge,’ however it’s mostly going the other way out of the city, which makes me hopeful that people are rushing home to make sure to be able to vote. Once I get to Englin’s house, I make phone calls for about half an hour. I really hate making phone calls, by the way, but that’s what there is to do, so I do it. The local effort is so under control, though, that the calls are to Virginia Beach, in support of Glenn Nye‘s congressional race. As part of the organizing efforts extraordinaire, folks have canvassed the neighborhood twice already by 4:30pm to determine who’s voted. There are a few people left who they haven’t caught, so I head out for another loop of the surrounding blocks to knock on doors as ask if folks have voted. They have or they aren’t home or, in the case of two guys I catch on their porch, they’re on their way to do so right now.
5pm I am getting concerned about getting back to Maryland, and I want to stop at the polls themselves with the snacks I’ve brought. I was hoping for mobs of people after work, so that I could get some good pictures. Apparently I needed to be in Virginia at 6am to get those shots; by 5pm everything is moving along quickly. The Obama volunteers and Election Protection folks are still there, though, so I stop at two local schools and offer up cookies on my way back out of town.
6:30pm Once home, we head right over to the elementary school so that my partner can vote. Someone has very kindly cleaned up the coffeepot that I left there earlier in the day, and I pass around the remaining cookies to my local poll workers and get my photo taken by the local AP guy. The afternoon has been really slow (thus the opportunity to clean up the coffeepot) and everyone’s looking like they’ll be very glad to see the other side of 8pm. We also ran into our new neighbor, who’d been doing Election Protection down in southern Virginia all day. She tells us that she got stuck behind the Obama motorcade on the road last night and went all day on only three hours of sleep, and therefore declines our offer to hang out at our place and drink until the wee hours.
7:30pm Here we are back in our house, TV on, websites loaded, minimal precincts reporting as of yet. Expected first toast: Kay Hagan! In the meantime, I will be glued to the Indiana Secretary of State site. And, the returns blogging will continue in a new post.
