A snapshot from Virginia of the Obama-McCain race

Violinist and Obama campaign volunteer Linda Plaut arrived at 5:30 this morning at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School, a K-5 public school in Blacksburg, Va., home of Virginia Tech (short for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). 

(For the record, Plaut is the stepmother of my girlfriend, Julie Plaut, who interviewed her stepmom this afternoon and relayed the results to me.) Virginia, which carries 13 electoral votes, hasn’t gone to a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The polls close there at 6 p.m. CST. If Democratic presidential nominee and Illinois U.S. Sen. Barack Obama carries Virginia, Republican nominee and Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCain will have a very hard (though not impossible) time capturing the race for president.

People were already lining up as Plaut got to the school and started preparing for her role as a poll watcher for Obama. When the polls opened at 6 a.m., several of the veteran election judges serving at the school said they were “stunned” by the size of the crowds wanting to vote – and the rush of voters never slowed down through mid-afternoon, when Plaut finished her stint as a poll watcher.

“You don’t see lines like that except at [VaTech] football games,” Plaut said. Another aspect that veteran election folks found “striking” at the polling place today, according to Plaut, was the high proportion of African-Americans in the voting lines – in a town that has a very low proportion of African-American residents. (According to the 2000 Census, Blacksburg had a population just shy of 40,000, and 84 percent of those are white and just 0.11 percent are African-American.) 

And the atmosphere at this polling place in Blacksburg, Virginia, today? “It was generally festive,” Plaut said.