Washington, D.C.

Meredith Slesinger in D.C. writes:

I was looking for my voter registration card when my boyfriend called my cell phone to tell me that the line at our precinct stretched out the door, around the corner, and down the hill into Rock Creek Park. Clearly, the residents of Mount Pleasant in Washington DC were going to be in for a long morning.

General elections in Washington are generally anti-climactic. 90% of the city voted for John Kerry in 2004 and the Republican party is nearly non-existent in local politics, save for an obscure rule requiring that one of the at-large council seats be held by an opposing party. (This usually means interested candidates change their registration from Democrat to Independent.) DC is a place where at the presidential level, the winning candidate is a foregone conclusion.

However, the inevitability of DC's three electoral votes did not appear to deter myself and the rest of my neighbors from turning out to vote for Barack Obama. While I'm sure there has to be at least one McCain / Palin voter among the 12,000 or so residents of Mount Pleasant, I can report I have not seen a single McCain / Palin sign or bumper sticker anywhere in the neighborhood. In fact, I can only recall a spotting a single McCain / Palin yard sign in DC at all, far up Oregon Avenue near the Maryland line.

Mount Pleasant is one of DC's most diverse neighborhoods, with a population nearly evenly divided between whites, blacks, and Hispanics. I couldn't help but grin as I walked down the hill to meet my boyfriend at end of the line, passing the entire racial and socioeconomic spectrum on my way. Mount Pleasant residents run the gamut from the affluent to those barely getting by. Regardless of color or tax bracket, everyone in line this morning was excited to be voting in this election.

In and of itself, that's pretty sweet.