Personally, I don’t think anybody was honestly surprised at the outcome of the Presidential election yesterday. Obama’s lead solidified into a permanent situation several weeks ago, and the increasingly desperate and frankly appalling rhetoric of the McCain-Palin campaign was complete acknolwedgement that they were fully aware that they had lost. The nervousness on the part of Obama supporters was tied almost entirely to the fear that somehow the Republicans would find a way to steal a third consecutive election, not that Obama could not win of his own accord. The media did an above-average job of showing enough restraint to wait until they could legitimately project Obama’s victory once the West Coast polls had closed, even though it was clear much earlier in the evening what that 11:00 projection would be.

The three of us sat together and watched election returns and nibbled on some excellent cheeses. I drank some very nice Cote-du-Rhone wine. We let Charlotte stay up until the 9:00 projections had been made, sending her off to bed confident that Barack Obama had won. Bridget was next to fall, around 10:00. I had a little more wine to enhance the celebratory mood and stuck it out for the Big Call at 11:00, right up through McCain’s very good concession speech and then until President-Elect Obama addressed the tens of thousands of people gathered in Grant Park. Though I mostly watched NBC’s coverage, I also caught a bit of the action on CNN, CBS and ABC and have to say I think NBC did the best job (although I missed the “Obi-Wan Blitzer” holograph bit which people are buzzing about today). I got a kick out of the blue and red scaffolds on the 30 Rock building and the map on the ice rink. Between the goings on in New York and the awesome crowd in Chicago, it was really wonderful to see people turn Election Night into a national celebration.

Rather than belabor things too much, I just wanted to share a couple of maps with you, both from the New York Times:

This map is the county-by-county version of the now-typical Red State-Blue State map we’ve all come to know and love. As things turned out, at the state level, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight was 98% correct in his final prediction, only missing Indiana, which he called as “lean toward McCain” but went to Obama in a squeaker. At the county level, the map looks a lot more red than blue because of the population density issue: some states that went blue did so because the urban areas went Democratic, while the less-populated rural areas went Republican. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who has looked at these maps for the last eight years.

What I found interesting, though, is THIS map:

This map shows the increase in voting for each party by county, and the map is overwhelmingly blue. Even in states that we think of as “solid red”, more people voted Democratic than they did in 2004, and did so by huge percentages in many, many places. The only places where the Republicans picked up voters are limited to a band of red in the Appalachian states and into the Ozarks.

Now…as Election Day wore on yesterday, there was a lot of coverage given to what looked like a huge increase in voter turnout — long lines for early voting, long lines all day yesterday, and a lot of praise thrown at the youth vote for being so motivated in this election. With the votes almost all counted, though, youth voter turnout was only 1 percent higher than in 2004.

Blue America stands reborn, dear friends. At last the 40-year Republican choke-hold on the national political conversation is being broken by people who are fed up with the malfeasance and misdemeanors that have laid us so low. It was thoughtful and kind and politically astute of Barack Obama to extend a message of inclusion to Republicans last night, but the path is clear and it does not meander to the right. It is time for the conservatives to stand humble, if not outright shamed, to acknowledge the intellectual and integral bankruptcy of their party, embrace their own “Country First” motto, and support the return of progressive ideals and the agenda of a leader not beholden to a small extremist group of religious zealots. The notion of “a single United States of America” that Obama hailed last night will come not from appeasing the right wing, but from those right-wingers stepping aside and delivering on their devotion to their country by supporting the new President.

If you read this blog regularly, or even occasionally, you know that I have not been very supportive of Barack Obama myself. I was genuinely disappointed in his selection as the Democratic nominee, and further disappointed when, over the summer, he blatantly backpedaled on two major issues to placate conservative voters. And so I had publicly decided that I would instead write in Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders on my presidential ballot, since I believe they would be a better choice to run this country. And that was my intention as I walked into my local polling place yesterday morning. As I stood at the little voting stand, though, I knew that while I might be right to vote for other candidates, the time had come to take the same step I have just said the Republicans must do and support the man the majority of Americans have chosen to lead the country into a new era. So I took a deep breath and filled in the oval for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Let’s see what they can do.