Notes From The Swamp: Florida in the Final Days of the Election

There were hundreds of people at the early voting station in Hollywood, Florida, and the wait was ninety minutes. I was with Benji from The Daily Beast, and Josh from the LA Weekly. We asked people if the wait was too long and they said no, the didn't mind. Someone said, "It'll be one hour today, but four hours tomorrow."

It was three in the afternoon, only a little hot, t-shirt and jeans weather. A local lawyer who volunteers for Florida Democrats said, "The reason the Republicans are against early voting is because they know no one would wait three hours to vote for John McCain." But this year Republican Governor Crist has extended early voting, which many see as waving a white flag. Crist said, "It's not a political decision, it's a people decision." One Republican operative accused Crist of giving the election to Obama.

At the Obama rally in Sunrise eight or nine protesters screamed at the line of cars waiting to get into the stadium lot. "They speak lots of beautiful words," one of them said to me. "Obama knows how to project himself very well. But his package is all socialism and we've been through that already. I'm an exile. I came here in '66. My father served in the prison 12 years under Fidel Castro. This guy here is doing the same thing, talking pretty, and he's going to put socialism in this country."

"No socialism, no communism," a woman said, also Cuban. "I'll be a Republican for life, anyway. I've always been against communism and I've always been a Republican."