Mad Voter: Westerners can't wait to vote

It's happening everywhere. In New Mexico the weekend before last, I talked to folks who had stood in line for as long as three hours to vote on the first day of early voting. Reports then started coming in from my friends on a Nebraska campaign--record numbers of people were signing up for absentee ballots, or were showing up at elections offices to cast their ballots.

Then I went to Arizona and hear it again. The hotel workers and cab drivers in Las Vegas had all voted. My friends on campaigns in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska reported the same thing. Even in Idaho, the evening news here in Boise is reporting two and three hour long lines of voters. Everywhere, people just can't seem to wait until Tuesday to get this done.

Now, the fact that this campaign has been going on for nearly two years, and for some congressional candidates seeking rematches it's been three, might just have a little to do with that. The relentless hammering of political ads on the TV, the overflowing mailbox, the robocalls, the robocalls, the robocalls. Maybe if I just get it done, a voter might be thinking, it will all go away. At the very least I won't have to keep paying attention to it.

I'm not immune to that kind of thinking myself, alternately wishing there was a fast-forward button for life so we'd just know already and not being able to find enough hours in the day to write about all the aspects of this particular election that are so intriguing. But, I have to admit that after a month on the road, watching this election up close from congressional field offices all over the west, I'm a bit anxious myself to see this one on the books. For a couple of reasons, and they might be the same reasons that so many people are voting early.

Yes, this has been the longest campaign season in anyone's memory. The huge amounts of money raised have been spent on never-ending loops of political ads that dominate everywhere. The news, national and local, has been obsessed with the national horse race since its historic dimensions began to emerge with the entrance on the Democratic side of the strongest minority candidates, in the form of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we've ever seen. And therein lies, I think, a source for much of the enthusiasm.

I particularly think about the long conversations I had with folks in Las Vegas over the weekend. Not the out-of-towners, too bleary eyed and stimulus over-loaded from hour upon hour in the unrelenting noise, flashing lights, and hypnotic chance of the casinos. No, the best conversations I had were with the people who do the work in Vegas, the bell boys, cab drivers, waitresses, and store clerks. Those people you forget about who keep the playgrounds for the rest of us running.

Most of them had already voted, partly out of a very real fear that they needed to do so early because if their vote was going to be challenged, they needed to have plenty of time to straighten the problem out and make sure they're vote was cast and counted. I spent a lot of time talking with Larry, a young Hispanic guy opening doors for the tourists at the Stratosphere, who told me about the family event he made out of early voting this year.

His sister, who had served four tours in Iraq, was going to be voting for the first time. His mother, an off-and-on voter, was determined this year. So the three of them went to the elections office the first day of early voting and made sure they were going to be counted. And it took a fight, because there was a glitch with his mother's registration. Someone with the same first and last, but not middle, names had already sent in an absentee ballot and his mother had mistakenly been the one marked as voted. After a long discussion, which his mother probably wouldn't have had the courage to have if her children had not been present and determined, the error was worked out and the whole family voted. Then Larry started working on his extended family and coworkers--an easy task, he told me. By the time he talks to them, he says, most of his coworkers have already voted, too.

Change is a powerful message in 2008. It's resonance isn't limited to the minority communities who see in Barack Obama, finally, the opportunity to see themselves reflected in their government. After all these years, now they're going to be full-fledged Americans, too, because finally they've got proof of that old saw everyone's heard: in the United States, anyone can grow up to be President. Well, maybe it really is true, and they can help make it happen.

Joan McCarter is a contributing editor of DailyKos.com and a researcher of Western politics

One of the other reasons, though, that change is such a powerful message this cycle is that it is so necessary. Evidence of that was all over Las Vegas in the form of abandoned construction projects and the hundreds of empty commercial buildings scattered all across the city. But it goes a lot deeper. I spent a morning accompanying congressional candidate Dina Titus on a canvass in a middle-class Vegas neighborhood. In the six or seven blocks we walked, there were no fewer than six abandoned homes, windows shuttered and yards overgrown with weeds.

Las Vegas has been hit harder than any other city by the foreclosure crisis and the resultant economic crisis. Credit has dried up, the torrent of tourists is slowing to a trickle and the casinos who are publicly traded are seeing their stocks plummet. A city built on speculation and engineered to beat the odds has finally come up lemons, and it's the people who live there who suffer the consequences.

The epicenter of the nation's woes might be in Las Vegas, but every corner of the country is feeling it. And that, I think, is the other reason so many people are so anxious to vote--after eight disastrous years of a negligent government, change can't come too soon.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter's weekly blogs are part of a feature on PoliticsWest called "Diary of a Mad Voter." The group blog, published in partnership with NewWest.Net/Politics, is intended to give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the 2008 election year.

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