Election night

Last Tuesday was election night (in case you hadn't realized) and I was psyched and ready to go. Called one of the most influential elections in the past 20 years, the candidates were disagreeing on almost everything and the America that would emerge after the 4 years with either president would be starkly different.

I feel I had spent a decent amount of time covering the run-up to the election. I watched the debates, read articles and analyses, and discussed topics with my peers. Being a Dane, the odds that I was rooting for Romney was 1-100, not least due to social and foreign-policy issues, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of an American and I do believe he would be the better candidate for the economy. In a corporate setting, Romney would be the CFO, and Obama the CEO - simply a better man for America when looking at all their traits and ideas.

GLOBErs spend an awful lot of time together, so we had clashed swords concerning the candidates many times before. I therefore opted to stay on campus and watch the election in the common room of my dorm, hoping to discuss politics with Americans who had less exposure to a globalized world and who might offer up new viewpoints. Plus there was free food and drink.

I learnt a couple of things. First, Chapel Hill and the younger generation are overwhelmingly pro-Obama. Second, the active voter in America is surprisingly well-informed. Having two candidates might make for partisan chambers and little collaboration across the aisle, but it does propose a relatively simple choice, as compared to Denmark with its seven major parties. Third, there are a significant number of inactive voters. These people cast their vote, but have little clue about what is happening and why. They are also reluctant to discuss politics, and they didn't show up to election night. A girl I talked to a couple of days before voted Romney because her parents did, even though most of her beliefs were way over in the Obama camp.

So election night was somewhat anti-climactic. Only 25 students or so showed up, most with their homework to kill time (thus not in discussion mode). Food was cheese pizza (go figure), which made the room smell like fondue and made me slightly nauseous. On a practical note, America's 5 time zones (6 including Alaska + Hawaii) means that focus is only on a couple of states at a time. Furthermore, America's size, electoral system and inter-state diversity means that the individual vote seems to play a lesser role. A Democratic voter in Texas has absolutely 0% influence. North Carolina went Republican, but everyone who was pro-Romney seemed awfully quite on a blue campus.

The highlight of the evening was a discussion with my Danish room mate. CNN announced that Pennsylvania went Democratic after 40% of the votes had been counted. This was based on exit polls, the current vote count relative to past years' results on a county level, and the statistical confidence interval at that point in time when Obama was up 58% to 41%. This (as my room mate aptly pointed out) is never 100% accurate, and kept referring to the Bush - Gore election and the Florida recount. This could potentially happen again, and therefore CNN should not refer to Obama as the winner until those key states had been tallied. True, but the pressure to be the first to announce the winner was more important. Most surprising was that most of the Americans had no clue what we were talking about, taking Obamas victory as certain. So while we exchanged a few more arguments, the student body of UNC grabbed their phones and jackets, chanting Obama's victory into cyberspace and into the crisp Carolinian night sky.