“I’m so nervous I could puke,” one waiter told another last night at Docks, a midtown Manhattan restaurant. “What if he doesn’t win?”
The campaign that seemed eternal finally comes to an end today, and still we fret about a replay of 2000 and 2004, when Election Day was not the end, but an escalation of months-long worries and anxieties.
Little work will be done, as Americans wait in lines outside polling places, monitor the web and listen to the pundits do their best not to predict the outcome of the most watched campaign in history.
The Obama campaign has mobilized thousands of black voters and young voters, but as AP notes, registration numbers are high even in Republican strongholds such as Alabama, Utah and Oklahoma.
More than 29 million Americans have already cast their votes through early and absentee ballots. The total turnout is expected to beat the modern record set in 1960, when 64 percent of registered voters went to the polls, electing another young Democrat, John Kennedy.
With the global connectedness of finance, trade and terror, there have been few times in history when it seemed more unfair that the world doesn’t get to vote in the U.S. presidential election.
Indeed, the Newsweek headline this week reads: “The World Hopes for Its First President.“
The UK-based Economist, which endorsed Obama, has sponsored an online Global Electoral College in which the world gets to vote.
The globe, it turns out, is predominantly blue. The exceptions: Congo, Algeria and Iraq.
In the U.S., one of the first states to watch will be traditional Republican Virginia, where the polls close at 7 p.m. EST.
“An Obama win in Virginia would be a sign the race is over,” John Fortier, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Bloomberg.
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