Barack Obama is going to be our next president! Even a few days after the election it is still exciting to write that. Obama's victory was even bigger than many polls suggested - winning at least 365 electoral votes, with the state of Missouri still too close to call. Obama turned formerly red states blue, including Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and Ohio. We also took back states Democrats have won in the recent past, including Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

There has never been a campaign where so many people owned a share of the victory.  Every door hanger, every phone call, every financial contribution - large or small - made a difference.  More than 1200 volunteers worked on the Monterey County Democratic campaign and logged more than 65,000 phone calls to swing states during the final weeks of the campaign.  We called every swing state and helped turn every single one of them blue.  Dozens of our volunteers traveled to Nevada and New Mexico during the campaign to get the battleground experience first hand.  Locally, we distributed more than 30,000 door hangers and mailed more than 80,000 voter guides to help Obama's coattails take effect - and they did.

Over the next couple of weeks we will share stories and pictures from the campaign trail.  If you have any of your own to share with us, please send them to info@montereycountydemocrats.org so that we can include them in our archives.  You will read about them in our upcoming newsletters and on our blog.  We are also planning a couple of events that will feature some of our best campaign stories. 

This is a time to celebrate.  As President-Elect Barack Obama said in his stirring victory speech in front of a million supporters in Chicago's Grant Park on Tuesday night, it is also a time to look to the future. We have work to do.  And we have to ask ourselves how we can keep the momentum going that this historic election has generated.