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When following the Diaz-Balart races this fall just wasn't enough for me I'd check in on my pet race, the one for the Senate seat in Minnesota between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. Maybe it's because Minnesotan blood runs through me. Maybe it's because the thought of Stuart Smiley entering congress amused me to no end. Maybe it's because Franken managed to make a true believer out of even notoriously cynical David Letterman who said, "When he talks and he says something, I believe him more than I believe anybody who currently holds a seat in the Senate," which in turn slightly melted my own cynical facade. 

Of all ballots cast in Florida November 4, John McCain actually led Barack Obama by five points, according to a new Associated Press study. Wowza. But Obama led the Maverick by 11 percentage points in early and absentee voting, thus winning the state. Nearly one-third of all votes cast in Florida were by mail or before Election Day.

Guess all the Republicans really did have a reason to want Charlie Crist's snowy-white head when he extended early voting hours.

--Kyle Munzenrieder

New Times hasn't caught up with Miami's own Fauxbama, Gerardo Puisseaux, since Tuesday's election results but the Obama impersonator industry is already seeing the influx of a host of new entrants.

Our favorite new Fauxbama comes from a user named AlphaCat on YouTube. Guy has the look and the voice down pat. Check out his debate preparation sketch, or the video above set to T.I.'s "Whatever You Like."

First black prez / Aint that nice. / Im in the highest office thats right! / Now I can do whatever I like / So what Im half black and half white / So what I fist bump with my wife / Man I can do whatever I like/ Man I can do whatever I like

But he's not the only new Fauxbama. Hipster Runoff reported an "ObamaAlt" siting on The Cobra Snake, before sharing dreams of Obama being a uniter, not a divider in the ongoing war between alts and mainstreams.

The Miami-Dade Elections office is releasing all of their nifty post-election data, and here's a map showing the geographical divide of the county. Even though Obama could be considered green in two alternative meanings of the word, he is actually represented by the teal. McCain is green. Beige represents a tie (in all but two of those precincts, no one actually voted. In the others two people each showed up and canceled the other out. I'm pretty sure those correlate to islands and such).

With a few notable exceptions, Obama dominated the areas closer to the coast, while McCain dominated our own version of the "Inland Empire". Those big patches of teal even further out west represents all of 1,731 vote (though, they did break handily for Obama).

--Kyle Munzenrieder

Riptide told you about Amendment 1, the ballot initiative that would basically change nothing, except remove a tiny passage in our state constitution that was rooted in racism. There wasn't really any logical reason to vote against it (every other state that had similar language has since removed it), but somehow 52 percent of us did.

Now the socialist newsletter known as the New York Times is here to subtly shame us.

“It’s terribly disappointing,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. “At a time when our country has turned away from a history of racism, we have left a racist and anti-immigrant provision in Florida’s Constitution.”

Ms. Little and others who supported removing the provision said that a mix of confusion and prejudice seemed to have led to defeat.

Apparently Floridians got to the voting booth and didn't really have all the information on what they were voting on. Imagine! Which kind of makes you wonder about the viability of this whole ballot iniative thing (at least in the manner we've used it now). Seriously, Floridians tell pollsters by a large majority they're down with civil unions yet somehow voted to ban them anyway.

Winnie Tang, president of the Florida chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, hopes to get the amendment on the ballot again. But the Florida legislature could easily undue the language with a three-fifths vote in each house. Every other state has gotten rid of similar remnants of a racist legacy. Why hasn't Florida?

--Kyle Munzenrieder

Last night was a bit bittersweet for liberals. We may have finally gotten our first "radical socialist" President into the White House since FDR, but in four states, including Florida, voters went to the polls to decide the fate of other people's personals affairs in the form of anti-Gay ballot measures, and it seems that all four of them will pass.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking is California's Prop 8 which takes away a right previously afforded to people. This whole idea of state initiatives comes out of the Progressive Era, and it's original intent was never to decide issues of civil rights. Quite simply it's a perversion of democracy, and our sister paper out in San Francisco, SF Weekly, scored an interview with newly-elected California State Senator Mark Leno on the next step the battle for gay rights will take.

Yep, it's off to the supreme court once Obama replaces a few of the older conservative justices. We'll see, but Riptide has at least have a bit of hope that the part of our Amendment 2 that forbids civil unions may not hold up if it's challenged.

--Kyle Munzenrieder

Elton Gissendanner, New Times' favorite octogenarian ex-con running for a Florida House seat lost to Republican incumbent Denise Grimsley last night, as expected. It was a landslide: at last count, Grimsley had him beaten by more than 25,000 to his less than 12,000 votes. In a voting district in which Obama was beaten handily and only one race- for a sheriff- went blue, Gissendanner finished with the lowest vote total of any Democratic candidate. "I knew the chances of winning were zilch to nil," said Gissendanner this afternoon. "The position I was running for has been in Republican hands for 25 years. The only disappointment was finishing last in the party. I didn't think it would go quite that bad."

But Riptide didn't find him moping around his Lake Placid house. The lifelong vet was returning home from his real job: emasculating dogs and cats. "In fact, I didn't want to go to work today, because I'm sick with a cold," he says. "But with the election, I felt like I had a lot of vet work to make up. I did 23 animals today."

"Keep breathing," Gissendanner quips when asked of his ambitions after the loss, and says he has no plans to seek office again, although with a Roger Clemens-like caveat: "Never say never."

And though he says he suspects his wife Frances was "relieved" by his loss, Elton, who turns 81 this month, maintains his Depression Era-rooted distaste for the notion of quitting work for good. "I've been delaying my retirement for about five years," he says. "And it will probably be about 20 more until I take it."

Asked for his feelings on the Obama victory, Gissendanner turns cranky: "I'm a Democrat. Do I have to explain that to you?"

-Gus Garcia-Roberts

Once the McCain camp realized it needed something to run on besides "Hey, at least our guy didn't serve on some board with a washed up old terrorist," they decided to brand Obama as a "spread the wealth" Socialist. Well, the people who would suffer the most financially under socialism, and likely will see their taxes increased under an Obama administration, voted for him. Yep, according to CNN exit poll people who make more than $200,000 a year voted for Obama nationally at a rate of 52%. In Florida they voted for him 51% of the time. A strong reversals from 2004, as the same group voted for Bush 66% of the time nationally.

More interestingly, they were also one of the very few demographic groups were the majority voted no on amendment two at a whopping rate of 60%. In fact, in all of CNN's demographic slicing and dicing that group voted higher against the amendment than any other group except for self described Liberals, white Democrats, Jews and Irreligious folk.

--Kyle Munzenrieder

The Seminole Casino is the older, smoke-filled joint across the street from the Hard Rock in Hollywood. When a slot or poker player is in the zone, it seems like gambling is their only care in the world. Not even one of the most exciting presidential elections in history could tear them away from the casino, right?

Don’t wager on it. Of the half dozen or so gamblers I approached on election day at the Seminole Casino, all but one had picked a horse in the race. They spoke semi-excitedly about their “sure-bet,” Barack Obama.

“We need change,” a middle-age white woman from Davie said. “I never saw so many black people voting before,” she added before lunging to slip her frequent player card into a suddenly vacant slot machine. No way is she going to lose a hot machine over some political small-talk.

A middle-age black man sitting near the poker tables said he voted early on Friday, out of fear that he’d be prevented from casting a ballot on Election Day. Better to catch any glitches early, he figured. But those two hours and 45 minutes standing in line sure were tough. As he wearied, a 70-year-old black lady behind him in the early voting line wagged her finger at him and lectured: “Our people before us had to go through a lot worse than this. So you just hold on.” He did. Now he gets to slide into a seat at the no-limits poker table.

A young black man said he headed to vote at 5:30 am so that he wouldn’t miss a poker promotion called Aces Cracked. I asked how long he waited.

“I’m still waiting.”

“To vote?”

“Nooo, for a poker table.”

Okay, so maybe, for these folks, a thrilling presidential race can’t compete after all with the enticement of poker bonuses and free spins on slot machines lit up like carnival rides.

-- Amy Guthrie

10:30 PM

“Oh, it’s going to be a landslide,” Mayor Manny Diaz declared to Riptide at the official Democratic results watch party at a ballroom in Parrot Jungle. At this point it wasn’t much of a newsflash: Pennsylvania had just been called for Obama, sparking chants of “Yes We Did” from partygoers drunk on impending victory and alcohol.

Roughly half an hour later, the giant projection screen flashed the definitive results, and as the place exploded, Riptide decided to hit the streets. Our plan: look for fireworks and listen for clusters of car horns. The simple plan brought us into the raucous hearts of Miami’s black neighborhoods. Almost instantly, pockets of crazy revelry had taken over whole streets.

At NW 54th St. and 2ng Ave., Haitians young and old forced a block to be closed off as they danced in the streets. Old women in sun dresses shook cowbells, and young teenagers on bikes raced recklessly around moving cars. An elderly white-bearded man hunched in the middle of the crawling traffic and, with loud grunts, thrusted a sign with a photo of Obama at the motorists inside, letting that do the talking for them. Caribbean music and rap clashed with the constant horn-jamming.

The scene at and NW 62nd St and 7th Ave, was wilder. Made foggy with firework smoke, that intersection hosted a chaotic four-way parade of people driving with doors flung open, and friends and strangers clinging on to hoods or riding on rooftops, all screaming nothing but “Obama!” Many of the drivers hung completely out of their car doors, controlling their steering wheels with a finger, and the pedals with a sneaker toe. In the thirty minutes that Riptide witnessed this acrobatic gridlock, we were amazed that there wasn’t an accident, although our own car almost got smashed into by one of these “ghost-ridden” SUVs. The driver never saw us, and the expression on his face, pointed skyward, indicated he was somewhere else, in ecstasy.

The most fantastic part about these scenes? The cops dispatched to stand around in futile hopes of maintaining order were caught smiling at the shenanigans. Even though—yep, that’s a kid setting off a bottle rocket as he sits on the trunk of a Buick barreling through a Wendy’s parking lot. Miami-Dade cops, white ones, smiling.

A strange, wonderful night.

-Gus Garcia-Roberts