election day

So in an exciting coincidence, we arrived in Manhattan on election day! A lot of news crews had set up outdoor studios to mingle with The People, so after we had dropped the car off and hiked into Manhattan, we hightailed it up midtown to see what was happening.

First off we stumbled on a Fox news crew broadcasting outside the News Corp headquarters. That was pretty exciting to see, but nothing compared to just around the corner at the Rockefeller Center. The NBC studios are located here and they had a really huge and sophiscated getup. They had set up the whole outdoor area in Rockefeller Plaza in red and blue, with giant screens broadcasting NBC news out to the crowd. They had made badges and other election paraphernalia, like coffee hugs with Election Day 2008 on them. The best part was a tally on the side of the Rockefeller building showing the number of electoral votes each candidate had won. The current tally total for each candidate was represented by two guys in a window cleaning platform painted either red or blue. As each state was declared and its electoral votes won, the guys would move the platform up the building. Pretty funny.





They also had a huge map of the US painted on to the outdoor ice skating rink, and as each state was declared it got painted in red for a Republican win, or blue for Democratic.



It was clear that the crowd was very pro-Obama, and there was lots of cheering on the night. Any time that he moved closer to the magical 270 electoral votes, the crowd cheered wildly. Any time that someone mentioned something pro-American about freedom or democracy, the crowd cheered wildly. When New York was declared a Democratic state, the crowd cheered wildly.

I think the US is much more electronic with their voting systems, because as each state closed its ballot, the results for that state could be announced almost immediately, so when some of the swing states critical to the McCain campaign fell to Obama's side, there were big cheers.

At 11pm Eastern time, when California and other western states closed their ballots, Obama was declared the next President of the United States.



The winning tally at about midnight:




We stayed for the speeches and finally took ourselves home at about 1:30. We decided to snack in a diner to celebrate, and every five minutes some random person would run in and scream "Go Obama!!" or "Yes we can!!!" followed by cheers in response from the customers.



On the whole, a very unusual and exciting experience!