My inbox this morning was full to the brim with notes from people sharing election results. The typical email started off with, “I’m so sorry, but it looks like Hillary won Texas…”
I’m sorry, too.
But sadness about the Texas primary results isn’t the overriding emotion this morning. What I feel, rather, is a tremendous and uplifting sense of community.
I talked to hundreds of people in my precinct yesterday — so many that my voice is gone this morning. There were old people and young, of every imaginable ethnicity. I saw friends I hadn’t bumped into for years, others that I see daily, and still more that I’d never met before… and most of them were coming out for the senator from Illinois.
No, not everyone with whom I spoke was voting in the Democratic primary, nor was everyone supporting Obama. Of those who were, though, only two told me they were there to vote against Hillary… and those two didn’t come back to caucus. Negative energy and Obama support were mutually exclusive here.
Although our precinct spent over an hour in line outside waiting to get in to caucus (as evidently happened elsewhere, too), there was no evident hostility between the two campaigns’ supporters. Since I didn’t meet anyone who’d ever caucused before, I had the feeling that the sheer novelty of the experience superseded candidate choice.
In short, my experiences yesterday taught me that my neighbors and I have rather a lot in common — far more than I’d suspected, and far less than with other parts of Texas — and that’s very comforting.
Hillary Clinton didn’t win in Fort Bend County. In my area, Democrats outvoted Republicans 2 to 1, and Barack Obama won the popular vote by an enormous margin: 63% to Hillary’s 37%. Not only that, but if my precinct is at all typical, those numbers are going to carry into the caucus results, too.
We had 140 people for Obama vs. 83 for Clinton last night… and while there were certainly precincts that had larger turnouts, it was astounding for ours (where I’m told the typical turnout is about 4).
So to those of you who sent emails — yes, I’m disappointed… but when all is said and done, there’s a lot to be said for discovering that my neighbors and I share more than a zipcode.
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