ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA – Outside a poll at the William Ramsey Recreation Center in West Alexandria, Va., I spoke with an Obama volunteer named Claudia Waller, 69, who has watched her community change twice in the past 50 years. First, in the 1960s, African-Americans started buying quarter-acre lots on her street, and she was happy to see it. Then, in the past 20 years, her neighborhood shared Northern Virginia’s influx of foreign immigrants. Waller was happy to see the Vietnamese and Salvadorans and Ethiopians, who, she says, all hang out at Starbucks. “All the brown people go down there and you can hear Ethiopian here, Hispanic over there,” she said. “They must drink coffee all day.”
West Alexandria is an example of how changing demographics has changed the way the Old Dominion votes, and not just because rapid growth in the Washington suburbs has tipped the balance of power away from the redder downstate Virginia.
Despite its reputation as the land of soccer moms and government work-bots, much of Northern Virginia’s growth has come not from white suburbanites but from nonwhite immigrants. Northern Virginia has doubled its minority population in the past 20 years, mostly through immigration. Hispanics and Asians count for 21 and 15 percent, respectively, of the increase in the state’s voting population. Large enclaves of Ethiopians and the East Coast’s largest Vietnamese population have made close-in cities like Arlington and Alexandria a destination for Washington foodies — and a source of Democratic votes. While the Vietnamese skew Republican, most of the other burgeoning immigrant groups vote Democratic.
Turnout this morning in Virginia was roughly double past levels, with 40 percent of 5 million registered voters voting before noon. Democratic Party officials expect a record turnout at polls in traditional African-American enclaves, like Hampton Roads, and the areas that have seen the most new immigration, places likes Loudoun and Prince William counties, both among the nation’s fast growing counties, where some people waited for three hours to vote Tuesday morning. The wait was just as long at John Adams Elementary School in West Alexandria, where the line stretched around a long suburban block at 5 a.m.
In the rec center parking lot, I met Tefera Bezabeh, 38, who moved here from Ethiopia six years ago. He had just cast his vote, for Barack Obama, and was in a hurry to leave so he could start giving free rides to elderly and disabled voters. This is Bezabeh’s first time voting, ever. “In Ethiopia we don’t have such kind of democracy, ” he said. “It’s exciting, you know.” Bezabeh knows exactly why he supports Obama: healthcare. Like most cabdrivers, Bezabeh is a freelancer and doesn’t receive health or retirement benefits from his employer. He takes home about $9,000 a year, and there isn’t enough left over for healthcare. Medicare covers his two children, ages 5 and one and a half, but he and his wife just pray they don’t get sick. “God protect us,” he said. “It’s very scary.”
PHOENIX (AP) — Republican John McCain bid farewell Tuesday to the reporters and photographers who traveled the country with him during the presidential contest, calling the campaign “a great experience, full of memories.”
McCain came back to the press cabin with his wife, Cindy, to say goodbye during the final flight of Straight Talk Air. The group traveled between a visit to a call center in Albuquerque, N.M., and Phoenix, where the GOP nominee was holding his election night celebration.
“My friends, it’s our last flight on this airplane,” McCain told the assembled group as cameras clicked and digital tape recorders whirred.
“I’m feeling good, feeling confident about the way things have turned out,” McCain said. “We’ve had a great ride, a great experience full of memories that we will always treasure.”
He reminisced about the early days after his campaign imploded in July 2007, when just a handful of reporters continued following him around New Hampshire and other early primary states. He came back to win his party’s nomination this past March.
“Those are the ones that went around in the van with us and on the $39.99 flight to Manchester,” he joked.
McCain, long known as one of the most media friendly and accessible politicians, all but abandoned the signature “straight talk” rides with reporters aboard his campaign bus and plane this past summer as campaign advisers tried to impose greater message discipline.
He took a handful of questions from the traveling press on Sept. 23 in Michigan, but his last full-blown news conference was Aug. 13.
McCain told the media Tuesday: “So anyway we’ve had a great time and I wish you every success, I look forward to being with you in the future. Thanks very much.”
The Dole reign has ended in North Carolina as Democrat Kay Hagan upset incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole, marking the first time in 35 years that the state has not voted a Republican into the Senate.
In New Hampshire, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen grabbed another seat for her party in a win against incumbent Republican Sen. John Sununu.
The new balance of power now has Democrats leading Republicans 48-31, with another 14 races still to be decided tonight.
Having served in both President Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s presidential administrations before becoming the first female senator from North Carolina, Dole’s legacy seemed almost impossible to overcome when the campaign season began.
But a large turnout of early African-American voters in North Carolina offered an indication that Sen. Barack Obama’s relentless campaigning in the state may have paid off for Hagan.
“This is an example of a Democratic senator riding on Obama’s coattails,” said Jennifer Duffy, the senior editor at The Cook Political Report. “At least 500,000 early voters have been African-American, and Elizabeth Dole isn’t getting those votes.”
A negative campaign ad released by Dole just days before election that referred to Hagan as “godless” created controversy and may have led to Dole’s demise.
In the ad, Dole suggested that Hagan received money from the “Godless Americans” PAC, and an actress with a voice similar to Hagan’s was heard saying, “There is no God.”
In an ad of her own later that same day, Hagan defended herself and called Dole’s add “offensive.”
“I believe in God,” Hagan says in the ad. “I taught Sunday School.”
“My faith guides my life and Sen. Dole knows it,” said Hagan, who has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Dole over the ad.
In New Hampshire, polling numbers showed Shaheen leading Sununu throughout the race.
Despite Sununu’s well-known name — his father once helped run the White House, and the Sununu family is as prominent as you get in state Republican quarters — he was unable to fend off the Democratic challenger.
In the days leading up to the election, presidential historian Julian Zelizer said that “A loss for Sununu would be a lost Northeastern Republican.”
As the polls close on the east coast, Barack Obama is sweeping through Northeast state and is projected to win Pennsylvania, a battleground state that John McCain saw as a potential key to winning the election.
Besides Pennsylvania, Obama is also projected to win New Hampshire, another state where McCain campaigned in closing days in the hopes of capturing its electoral votes.
Other states projected to be in Obama’s column according to exit polls are Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington DC, Delaware, Illinois, and three of Maine’s four electoral votes.
McCain is projected to win Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina and Oklahoma.
Obama’s projected victory in Pennsylvania which has 21 electoral votes was a blow to McCain’s White House hopes. While it was carried by Democrat John Kerry in 2004, McCain had hoped to turn it into a red state.
“We’re going to win Pennsylvania tomorrow and I’m going to be the President of the United States,” McCain said at a rally Monday. “Pennsylvania will do it, and Pittsburgh will be the important area.”
There is still not enough information to project a winner in the battleground state of Virginia and Indiana.
Virginia has become a key to both candidates’ strategies, with Obama having outgunned McCain in the ground-game fight for the state.
Early exit polls found that Virginians were contacted more frequently by Obama campaign workers and believed that McCain unfairly attacked his Democratic rival.
Fifty-one percent of Virginia voters said they were personally contacted by an Obama campaign worker, versus 37 percent who were contacted by the McCain campaign.
Some 69 percent of voters in that state said McCain unfairly attacked Obama, versus 46 percent who thought Obama unfairly attacked McCain. In the final weeks of the campaign, McCain made negative attacks a mainstay of his race, going after Obama on his relationships and questioning his judgment.
The economy is nationally the overwhelming issue for voters casting their ballots in today’s historic presidential election, according to early exit polls.
Despite the possibility of Obama becoming the nation’s first black president, the turnout of black voters as a percentage of the national vote was at 13 percent, just slightly higher than in 2004, according to early exit polls.
The economy has long dominated the campaign, and voters’ concerns became heightened when the major banks and credit markets needed a massive federal bailout to avoid a fiscal catastrophe.
Four in 10 voters say their family’s financial situation is worse than it was four years ago, and eight in 10 are worried the current economic crisis will hurt their family finances over the next year.
New York – CPJ calls on Ethiopian authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into Friday’s beating of newspaper editor Amare Aregawi.
Aregawi, managing editor of the English- and Amharic-language newspaper Reporter, was released on Monday from a hospital in the capital, Addis Ababa, according to local journalists.
Journalists who visited Aregawi in the hospital told CPJ that he was badly injured when three men attacked him as he was walking near his office around 4:30 p.m. on Friday. Eyewitnesses told CPJ that the men approached Aregawi from behind, striking the editor in the head with a stone and repeatedly hitting him until he fell unconscious. The assailants jumped into a waiting car, driven by another man, but were impeded by a traffic jam, the witnesses said. Two men were apprehended at the scene, a third man was detained on Saturday, and a fourth remains at large.
Police have not publicly disclosed details of the arrests. Ethiopian federal police spokesman Demsash Hailu told CPJ that the Addis Ababa Police Commission was overseeing the investigation.
Reporter staffers, including Aregawi and editor Aseged Teffera, have received anonymous threats in recent weeks in connection with a series of investigative reports alleging that people close to Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire Sheikh Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi had mismanaged his investments, local journalists said.
“We condemn the barbaric beating of Amare Aregawi,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Tom Rhodes. “The Ethiopian police must do everything in their power to ensure the masterminds behind this brutal assault are also charged.”
It was the second time this year that Aregawi, one of Ethiopia’s best-known journalists, has faced reprisals over his paper’s critical coverage of influential business interests in the country. Aregawi was detained for 6 days without charge over a story reporting a labor dispute at a government-run brewery in northern Ethiopia.
