Obama Wins!

A friend back in the UK emailed me this morning asking what it was like to be in the US the day after the historic presidential election victory of Barack Obama. The campaigning had been going on for so long now and the coverage even back home was so intense, that I don't think that I'd really given it much thought until he asked, but it has certainly been interesting to have seen the election "up close".

One aspect I'd never really thought about were just the basic mechanics of the US electoral process. All along I'd somehow assumed it was essentially the same as a general election in the UK, but in fact there are significant differences: the UK prime minister is not elected directly (instead you vote for a member of Parliament) whereas here in the US, people get to vote directly for who they want to be president. These presidential votes are independent of who they want to represent them.

Also, each state is made up of a number of districts in each state, and the result for an state is dependent on the results from all the districts. Since the districts declare their results independently, the eventual winner in the state develops over a period of time (so the news networks would "project" the winner based on a subset of districts that had already declared).

Finally, not all states have equal weighting - some have more say than others in who becomes president (I guess based on the number of voters living there). So it's not a straight count of who won the most states.

Well, I imagine that this is all basic stuff for American voters. However I don't think that this is what my friend had in mind when he asked what it was like to be here for this historic election. The reality was that most of election day was pretty dull - there were no rallies on the streets around here, there were no long snaking lines when Kyle went to vote (she was done in about 4 minutes), and there were no results until the polls started to close (which of course didn't stop the TV networks providing non-stop pseudo-analysis and coverage).

Even when the results did start coming in, it didn't feel that exciting (but perhaps we were watching the wrong channel - we decided to watch the Daily Show's "Indecision 2008" programme). However at 11pm Jon Stewart announced that Barack Obama had been declared the winner (ok so we had to check with a real news channel before we really believed it), I think it started to dawn on me what a historic event this was. Also I hadn't fully appreciated how much race is still such a huge issue here.

Obviously the US and the world are facing enormous challenges, and getting elected is not the end but the beginning. However listening to Obama when he speaks is very inspiring, and he makes me believe that he really does speak for everyone and that maybe it is possible to overcome these global problems. Good luck to him, and us all.