Hoping for a meaningful election Each GOP primary produces a new winner, none of them the longtime national frontrunner. Meanwhile, the Democrats feature a tight race between an African-American and a woman -- pure history in the making. It can't get any better than that, the upshot being I might actually cast a ballot that matters for the first time in my life! Some background: I've never lived in one of those early primary states. Though I've dutifully voted in the preliminaries, I always went into the voting booth knowing beforehand what the next day's headline would read. That's pretty boring for a political scientist.