If you - like myself - won’t be spending Super Tuesday wining and dining your friends over let’s-watch-the-election-results dinner parties and celebrations but instead grinding away at work for your slice of the GDP, it’s easy to get left behind in all the election excitement. No McCain Straight Talk Espresso Martini for you - just another vente regular and a day at the office.

If that’s the case don’t sigh; instead, get pumped because it’s going to a be a historic day. Across the country, 24* states will hold caucuses and primaries to select their party favorites for the presidential nomination: 3,156 delegates across the Democratic and Republican parties will be decided in what will be decisively this nation’s first de-facto national primary.

For the first time in a long while, there’s no runaway front-runner in either party. For the first time, we as a nation are witnessing a delegate-by-delegate, district by district trench warfare for support, in which your vote in Fargo, MN is just as important as Maria Shriver’s or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in California. And for the first time in nearly 60 years we are facing the possibility of a brokered convention - or maybe even two - in August which, never mind being fun to watch, would be truly historic events.

Add together all those firsts and what you get is that for the first time in a while, a lot of people who have been disenchanted with and disconnected from our nation’s political life actually care. And that’s exactly what makes our Democracy “self-renewing:” every time we’re stuck in a rot and it seems like America is headed for decline, we bring new people into the political process and change direction for the better. High turnout today isn’t just good or great; it is absolutely critical for the continued prosperity of this nation.

So get ready, get pumped, and enjoy a very super, very historic Super Tuesday.

* You may have read 21 or 22 or even 23 in some newspapers; that’s just sloppy reporting. 19 states have both Republican and primary contests; 2 have Republican-only contests, and 3 have Democratic-only contests. Depending on how you add that, you could get a range of numbers but the 19 plus 5 is the total tally either way.

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