Watching the 2012 U.S. Elections and the role of social media

Tomorrow, the United States will choose their President for the next 4 years. Will it still be Pres. Barack Obama for a second term? Or will the next President be Gov. Mitt Romney?

Together with a few other blogger friends, Noemi and Juned, I got a sampling of activities and issues in the run-up to the November 6 U.S. elections when we attended the “Kapihan sa Embahada”, the second in a series of coffee talk and open fora organized by the U.S. Embassy of Manila.

U.S. Ambassador Harry K. Thomas, Jr. opened the Kapihan by describing this election as something you would not have seen in his childhood days. He specifically said that back when he was a child, no one would ever have imagined someone from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints going up against an African-American for the Presidency. He calls this a “positive change” and wished his father was still alive to see the state of U.S. elections.

Another change, Amb. Thomas said, is that there are many Filipino-Americans in California and Hawaii who are running for office. In fact in Nevada, where there are very large Filipino communities, he said you can find ballots in Tagalog (a major Philippine national dialect)! Filipinos are the 2nd largest Asian-American group in the U.S. Imagine the kind of influence they wield!

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