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Supersized-Tuesday Primary Reaction

7:05 p.m. ABC News just called Georgia for Barack Obama. It’s amazing how winners can be assumed when the polls have been closed less than five minutes and no votes have yet been counted. But assuming projections are correct (and oddly, they typically are), I am proud to be a Georgian tonight. I’m proud that a Southern state could choose an African-American candidate. And I’m encouraged to see the first few votes to show that there are more Democratic voters than Republicans. This bodes well for the general election. Voter turnout is the issue at hand. If LGBT voters, anti-war voters and rational Americans who are unable to reconcile the morality espoused by Republicans with the hate, mismanagement and miscalculation of the Republican party with their values. Maybe there is hope for America. Hope that a change is possible. And there’s no better news for the queer community. It will be interesting to see if this immediate projections and very early returns hold up over the course of the evening.

8:15 p.m. Results are mixed across the country. It is so refreshing to have a real race where every vote truly makes a difference. Gone are the days where party leaders decide who is next in line for the presidential nomination. The mass of states voting today is an important opportunity to move beyond the presumptive politics of the past, to a day when voters truly decide who will lead our country, not pundits or party insiders.

10:05 p.m. CNN is projecting Senator Clinton as the winner of Massachusetts. While the delegates at stake are not as numerous as in some others, it is symbolically significant. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement was not enough to secure his state for Barack Obama. And in a state with a significant LGBT population, Clinton proved a more compelling candidate than Obama. Analysis of Massachusetts voters over the next few days will be interesting. Clinton is believed to have a generally stronger political machine, while Obama has the power of the grassroots. It will be telling to discover if it was the process of politics, the message or personality that brought the state to Clinton.

11:10 p.m. Will someone please tell Wolf Blitzer to stop saying “uh” between every word? He’s driving me nuts. I’m not going to be able to stay on CNN much longer if he doesn’t cut it out.

11:59 p.m. In ballots counted so far, there are only about 100,000 votes between Senators Clinton and Obama. In today’s races, Obama garnered the most delegates, but Clinton is still leading in the delegate count overall. For Democrats, this is a profound election cycle. There are two very strong, refreshingly different, historic candidates. Either candidate promises to be is such light years more progressive and queer-inclusive than any we have seen in our lifetime. Yet “evangelical” turnout has proven strong on the Republican side. Will anti-gay social conservative Republicans be motivated to vote in the general election? Will the strong turnout in Democratic primaries be maintained or grow in the general election. All remains to be seen. But for LGBT voters, it is encouraging that two candidates who are generally pro-gay are leading the party’s race for the presidential nomination. Although neither candidate has an “ideal” position on LGBT issues, the success of both suggest that America may at last be willing to abandon homophobia in favor for the greater good of our country.

Did LGBT Voter Apathy Contribute to Michelle Bruce’s Election Defeat?

The votes are in, and we know the score: Michelle Bruce 1, Ignorance 0, Indifference 2. Transgender Riverdale, Georgia City Councilwoman Michelle Bruce lost her re-election run-off yesterday, one day after a Clayton County Superior Court Judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by two of her opponents in the general election. Losing candidates Stanley Harris and Georgia Fuller filed the suit in an attempt to delay yesterday’s runoff and void the November 6 city election based on their claim that Bruce misled candidates by running as a woman. Michelle Bruce 1, Ignorance 0. The former candidates filed an immediate appeal.

At the polls yesterday, Bruce lost by 85 votes to Wayne Hall, 308 to 223, according to the Associated Press. A check of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Website shows that there are 6,124 registered voters in the City of Riverdale as of November 1, 2007, but only 531 voted. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the rule-of-thumb applies and that about 10 percent of Riverdale’s population is queer. Even I can do that math–that’s about 612 voters. To take that one equation further, even if all 223 of the Riverdale voters who cast their ballots for Bruce were LGB or T, that means another 389 didn’t vote at all or didn’t vote for Bruce. Not to suggest that all GLBT voters are or should be single-issue voters, it’s still disappointing that so many didn’t even bother to vote at all. Engaged in LGBT politics or not, it would seem that a full-frontal attack on someone in our community would manage to motivate another 86 people to get to the polls. That’s all it would have taken for Bruce to win. In fact Bruce did win the most votes (312) in the general election, just no enough to avoid the runoff. Less than 100 additional votes would have avoided the run-off altogether.

My hypothetical equation doesn’t even factor in tolerant straight voters. Participation by an even smaller percentage of queer-friendly heterosexual voters would have also changed this game. It seems clear that the majority of all voters–queer and straight–don’t see LGBT rights and acceptance as important enough to get out and vote. The score on that one: Michelle Bruce 0, Indifference 2.