So now that the race is decided, here’s what we have according to FiveThirtyEight.com:

Obama:

Electoral Count: 365 (fooled me - he took that final EV in Nebraska!!)
Popular Vote: 52.3%

McCain:

Electoral Count: 173
Popular Vote: 46.2

Remember that bonus question about what percent of eligible voters would turn out to vote? Probably ya’ll thought I was nuts (tony says cynical) but dudes, I wasn’t too far off. Mine was the lowest prediction, too. According to the latest data, the voter turnout is pretty much exactly what it was in 2004 - the difference was in WHO showed up. This time the Dems showed up, the Reps stayed home. But the overall turnout was almost identical. Bummer.

Ok onto the final results. I’m gonna have to call two winners, one for the EV and one for the Popular Vote.

Electoral vote goes to Melinda who was just 3 electoral votes off! Brilliant Melinda! She guessed 368 to 170. Impressive!!! I think I was actually second to you with my 12 votes off. I’m proud

For popular vote, I am SHOCKED that several of us came so very incredibly close, especially given how far off we got in the EV! It is crazy to me that we all called it! Several people (including me! yay!) had mere fractions of a point off both candidates but the winner for the closest call is Jonathan who was just two-tenths of a point off both candidates with his predictions of 52.1 for Obama and 46.4 for McCain!

So both of you, contact me with your mailing address and you’ll get your yumminess ASAP! Thanks for playing, everyone! That was fun! Now I’m off to tally my kids’ predictions to see who gets ice cream tonight!!

**updated to say that I understand North Carolina has now been called for Obama. I understand, also that a single electoral vote has yet to be decided for Nebraska. I’m going to go ahead and assume Missouri goes to McCain and if that changes in the future, well, then I’ll send out another gift card Stay tuned for my tallies!**

So how did you spend election night? And are you recovered yet? I have to say, we had a pretty good time and no, I suspect I may not recover for a long time.

I saw this quote from an Andy Borowitz column that pretty much sums it up in a hysterical-but-true way:

Just minutes after their party’s longstanding losing tradition lay in tatters on the ground, millions of shell-shocked Democrats stared at their television screens in disbelief, asking themselves what went right.

For Democrats, who have become accustomed to their party blowing an election even when it seemed like a sure thing, Tuesday night’s results were a bitter pill to swallow.

And it’s true! What do we do now?!? What will Jon Stewart quip about on the Daily Show! Last night he tried his hand at an Obama imitation and it just came out as…BUSH! Oh no! Who will SNL mock? I miss Tiny Fey’s Sarah Palin already. Sniff. And yesterday even Elizabeth Hasselback broke down in tears as she crossed over to the “dark” side and embraced Obama.

I’ll tell you what I’m looking forward to now. I’m practically falling apart waiting for the “behind the scenes” tell-alls to start leaking out! I LIVE for that stuff. Don’t judge me! Maybe you watch Soap Operas or read all about Celebrity Gossip. Or follow that ridiculous testosterone-driven archaic embarrassingly-American sport, football (oops - was that judgmental?). I don’t do any of the above. My vice is post-election tell-alls.

They’ve already started coming out and OMG it is like Christmas every time I read one! Seriously this is a sickness. I can’t stand it. I just can’t wait until all those campaign aids start publishing books. I give them two weeks, tops. I think I love them so much because we’ve all known that we only get to see a very controlled kind of info during the election process. We don’t see how the candidates really are behind closed doors. We don’t see how they relate to their aides or how they relate to the press. We don’t see what they REALLY don’t know or what they REALLY think. And I want to know!!!!!! Even though - no - especially BECAUSE it is no longer relevant, it doesn’t matter anymore! I want to know!

Ok so onto the Election Day festivities. We baked up some cupcakes and the kids decorated them with red, white and blue sprinkles.

Dalton, ever our anal-retentive decorator, made Obama symbol cupcakes for everyone to eat in celebration of the victory we were sure was coming.

By the time that happened, we were too stuffed from eating all the other cupcakes so we saved them for the next day and just toasted with Bubbly and got them nice and drunk.

{Obama! Par-tay!}

{oooh I see double!!}

{can I have seconds?}

I kid! I kid! It was sparkling apple juice. They were drunk off Patriotism!!!

We watched all night as the returns came in. I texted with friends in several different states as we high-fived virtually and shared tears over our iPhones and facebooks and emails and blogs (I love technology). The kids ate cheddar popcorn and made caricatures of both candidates (and a bonus pic of Hillary). Noah made his own map of the states and followed along by filling in each state red or blue as called. Teegan made campaign signs and we all filled out an electoral map prediction from a yet-to-be-determined reward for the yet-to-be-determined winner. Good times!!!!!! The kids, minus Addy, stayed up through the concession speech and Obama’s speech. I wanted them to be part of that history.

My only regret? I forgot to watch Comedy Central! I got all caught up in the news coverage and forgot! I tried to catch the midnight re-run but passed out 5 minutes in. I can’t believe I missed Colbert and Stewart *in tears*!!! Boy was I glad it was a short night - I don’t know how I could have stood the suspense all night long.

So! We had some predictions and someone gets a Starbucks giftcard. But I can’t say who, yet, because they still have not called North Carolina!!! As soon as they do, I’ll tally the results and announce the winner. I’m happy to say that my own prediction was short both in electoral votes AND popular vote. That is one contest I am HAPPY to lose in that way!!!!!!!!

Less than a year ago Tony and I sat and talked politics (big surprise, I know!) and sometimes we don’t even agree! This was one of them. We were discussing the primaries. We pondered who had a better chance at actually being elected and whether the country is ready for a female president, a black president or some other minority group that we both dismissed handily pretty fast. But we could not agree on whether the country was ready for a black president or a female president and it is probably at least a little telling to admit that I can’t even remember which side I argued for anymore!!! It has been a VERY long election cycle and I think it challenged so many people’s ideas about what we are ready for, including mine.

Today I realized that the glass ceiling is not just cracked but gone. Through Obama’s win, not only do people of ALL color now know they have a chance at the presidency but women do, too.  14% of the Senate is female and females holding such a high office is no longer shocking. Only 2% of the Senate is black. Although women are still not equals in the workplace, they still do not receive equal pay and they certainly are not equally represented in our government, women - as half the race - do not suffer from hate-based bigotry and disenfranchisement like minorities do. And hate-based bigotry and disenfranchisement - while it is a lot better than it was 50 years ago - is still alive and well in America.

But it is not the quiet majority. The Bradley Effect is Dead.

And for me, that means that the path ahead for our daughters has been paved by this historic event. The ceiling is broken. And if a black man with the foreign-sounding name Barack Hussein Obama was elected into this nation’s highest office, even after throwing out all the fear-based tactics the other side could muster,  then anything is possible for our daughters, our minority and biracial children and all of us. Anything!

That is something I did not believe to be true just a few short months ago. I did not believe our country was ready to hurdle the divide. But we did it and there is no looking back now. We’ve changed the face of the presidency, finally. We’ve opened doors for everyone, finally.

So that’s where my heart rests today. I feel so patriotic today for the first time since 2000, and not just because my guy won but because of what our great country stood up and made happen and what that says about our country. I feel pride. I feel like we are finally capable of being the World Power we have erroneously claimed to be the last several years. And I feel the collective International spirit nodding their heads and opening their arms. I literally feel that!

That said, I want to take an excerpt from something left in my blog comments and from her blog:

Hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man-hours spent on both sides by good-intentioned people who want to make a difference in an historic election, so many resources and voices and energies devoted to a single day. After tomorrow, half of that is going to have been a waste. And I can’t help but wonder what could have happened if all that muscle had been put towards something else, and what will happen to its momentum after the election has come and gone. Shouldn’t we be donating our money to good causes whenever we can? Helping people who don’t have? Dedicating some of our time to contribute to making the country which provides for us a better place? Of course a power shift is a hugely significant step on the path to great reform, but worrying about this election has been a wakeup call for me:

Even if Obama wins, we have not “won.” This isn’t a movie and we can’t toss every greedy lobbyist oil fatcat bigot down a reactor shaft. I think if we dedicate ourselves to the ongoing welfare of the country as much as we have to the outcome of this election, we’ll have a much better shot at coming closer to the overwhelming good the liberals hope Obama will usher in, but which no mere mortal could fully realize alone.

And this really spoke to me. The election is over. No matter what side you supported, it is now over. We saw so many people so active in politics! We saw people go to rallies, canvass door to door, make phone calls, donate money they barely had to give during a time of great economic upheaval, post on their blogs and advocate for their own version of betterment. The level of participation in this election was amazing!! But….what will you do to make a difference in the world TODAY? What will you do TOMORROW? Will you stretch your dollar a little thinner for a cause you believe in like you did last week? Will you spend your time and energy and resources advocating for something that needs betterment? Or will you be complacent and then complain when things don’t work out? Will you do nothing and hope others pick up the slack? Will you make excuses for your time, money and energy? It’s up to each of us, now.