Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m pretty happy about what went down last night. I was sad that I wasn’t at home in Chicago with Obama and a hundred thousand other people, but I had a good time on my college campus as it erupted soon after 8pm (Western Time).
As CNN projected Obama’s win and the results kept coming in, I started to realize the change in our country that was actually occurring. And then as I began to read what people had to say about how Obama won last night, it began to dawn on me just how much change had occurred overnight in America.
The game that unfolded last night was not the same game that unfolded four years ago. The Democrats that were battling the Republicans in 2004 were not the same people that stepped up to vote yesterday. The electoral map changed significantly as red states went blue, but the issues that people are voting on and the people who are voting have changed significantly as well. An article on Politico.com helped me realize the significant change that happened on election night:
If [Obama's] was the first 21st-century campaign, his victory was powered by a new face of America: made up of all ethnicities, hailing mostly from cities and suburbs, largely younger than 40, and among all income classes.
As they emphatically proved by obliterating the presidential color line, many of these voters are not guided by traditional cultural attachment to race, religion or region.
What makes his victory so resounding, and so daunting for Republicans, was that he combined support from African-Americans, Jews and young whites with other key groups. He also reversed Bush’s advances with Hispanic voters.
Further, and even more worrisome for the GOP, Obama was dominant among self-described “moderate” voters, a 60 percent swath of Americans larger than either self-described liberals or conservatives.
This 21st-century coalition allowed Obama to blow out McCain in cities and suburbs where Bush had narrowly won or lost by smaller margins four years ago, and to pull off narrow wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana and Ohio.
He ran up huge margins in heavily-black cities and counties in each but was able to edge out McCain thanks to big wins in populous, racially mixed localities such as Virginia’s Fairfax County (59 percent), North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County (62 percent), Florida’s Orange County (59 percent), Indiana’s Marion County (64 percent) and Ohio’s Franklin County (59 percent).
The coalition underscored the theme that made Obama famous in 2004, and one that he returned to in his victory speech, citing his support from “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.”
The Obama campaign’s strategy, in hindsight, was remarkably genius for realizing that, as Obama put it many times, “our moment is now.” The man behind the curtain, Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod, must have seen or guessed that the campaign could tap into a “new america” in order to get out the vote for Obama. This “new america” allowed the campaign to play a larger and more ambitious map than other Democratic candidates.
The change that came about yesterday is thus more than a significant (although very important) power shift in Washington. Its about the new face of America. Its about the end of an era in America, and the beginning of a new one. Another article on Politico.com pointed this out:
The 1960s are over — finally
For two generations, American politics has been dominated by issues and personalities that were shaped by the ideological and cultural conflicts of the Vietnam era.
The rest of the population may have been bored stiff, but the baby boomers continued their remorseless argument, as evidenced by Bush and Kerry partisans quarreling over Swift Boats and National Guard service in 2004.
Obama had not yet reached adolescence in the 1960s. He seems little interested in the cultural conflicts that preoccupy baby boomers. The fact that he admitted to using cocaine was hardly a factor in this election.
And this young president-elect exerted powerful appeal over even younger voters. They favored Obama by 34 percentage points, 66 percent to 32 percent — a trend with huge potential to echo for years to come.
Guns, God and gays will not disappear from our politics. But they are diminished as electoral weapons as the country confronts a new generation of disputes: global warming, mortgage meltdowns and the detention of terrorism suspects, to name a few.
Another genius foresight by the Obama campaign was to recognize that America was done with the 1960s.
Before Obama was elected last night, I remember the YouTube vidoes and other pro-Obama media in which people said that this was the first time they felt like someone in American politics was going to actually represent them; that this was the first time they felt like someone was going to be their president, the president of the people. Not until late last night did I realize how fundamentally true that statement is to the America that I woke up in this morning.
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