Last night I witnessed democracy in action and it was inspiring. I worked as a Democratic Party poll watcher at the Mt. Pleasant Community Center near Belle Mead in Greenville County. 467 voters had come through the lines when I arrived at 1pm and by the time the polls closed at 7pm the total was 1,090 voters, which was 56% of all the registered voters in the Mt. Pleasant precinct. The media consistently painted a portrait of Obama supporters as disillusioned and not as enthusiastic as they were in 2008. I couldn’t disagree more. I saw people patiently wait in line for more than an hour, then present multiple forms of identification and smile widely when they walked to the voting machine.

Even those who encountered problems with change of addresses or redistricting, were willing to drive to another polling location, many had to wait several more hours at county square. Many of these folks were voting for the first or the second time in their lives. I saw several voters in their late 80’s and 90’s that were jubilant as they exercised their hard won civil right to vote for our president.

I want to give credit to the awe inspiring work of the Obama for America volunteers. The Greenville County effort was led by the tireless Kaye Martell and the dedicated Megan Arnold. Every training I attended was full, the phones were ringing off the hook at Democratic HQ, meetings of Democratic Women were jammed and everyone stepped up to do what they could. It’s so easy to get discouraged as a Democrat in South Carolina but know this, our party is alive and thriving. We will not turn the GOP driven Titanic around in a year in South Carolina or even 10 years but with the leadership of our president and the amazing efforts of OFA volunteers we will get there one day. The reason Obama and Biden won re-election was because of the extensive ground campaign set up in 2007. The efforts to re-elect the president began in 2008 and continued through the fall of 2012. This organization is entrenched now and will help us elect another Democratic president in 4 years and continue to recruit and elect more Democrats locally and statewide in South Carolina.

As much as I feared the effects of voter suppression efforts led by the Republican Party, I truly believe now that those efforts back fired rather badly for the GOP. I think it motivated and inspired people to go out and secure their voter registration cards, to update their addresses to reach out to the elderly to ensure they had proper ID and a means of getting to the polls on election day. These efforts have fully prepared us for the next election and the GOP should live in fear. As Senator Lindsey Graham said recently about his party, “The Republican party is running out of angry white men.”

While the Tea Party was pushing moderate Republicans to the margins, the Democratic Party was working tirelessly to recruit people of all ages, colors and sexual preference. Angry rhetoric about immigration reform and xenophobic comments served to drive up the numbers of Hispanic and Latino voters supporting Obama. Women rose up in large numbers to say that they wanted to control their own bodies and they refused to return to a pre Roe v. Wade world. Romney Ryan ran a flawed campaign from the start. Every one of their public events was dominated by white, evangelical, voters. They locked up that constituency long ago and instead of extending their reach have pushed moderates out by aligning with the Tea Party.

The 2012 election also proved that you can’t buy an election. The citizens united Supreme Court decision unleased corporate money leading to hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s Crossroads for America, gambling titan Sheldon Adelson and many others but in high profile races like Linda McMahon in Connecticut voters saw through the smoke screen of money and negative TV ads and turned out to vote for the underdog. McMahon co-founded the World Wrestling Federation and decided she wanted to buy a seat in the US Senate. She spent 100 million dollars on two attempts and failed twice. In Massachusetts, Rove and the GOP spent tens of millions of dollars to help Scott Brown hang on to his Senate seat only to be defeated by consumer champion Elizabeth Warren. Senator Jim DeMint endorsed and financially supported Todd Aiken in his Senate race against Claire McCasskill and lost. In Indiana, voters supported Romney for president but rejected the Tea Party candidate for Senate Richard Mourdoch.

I must say it felt good to watch Karl Rove and the rest of the clown car crew on Fox News try to spin their way out of the grave but…elections have consequences and the results of this election will reverberate for many years to come.