Tammy Baldwin Agonizingly Close to Becoming the First Openly Gay Senator

Oh my gaaaaaaaaaahd, Tammy Baldwin! Is anyone else out there anxiety-pacing all-day all-night because you just want Tammy Baldwin to win so bad? Can’t you just taste a Tammy Baldwin victory? (It tastes like blueberry muffins!) Baldwin is in a dead heat with Republican Tommy “Tom-Tom the Tomahawk” Thompson (hot-button issues: alliteration, eyebrows), with both candidates currently tied in the polls after months of record-breaking campaign spending. Baldwin is hopeful that actual voting numbers will skew in her favor: “It’s going very well,” she told the Guardian. “There is momentum with us and I don’t think the polls have picked up on this all over the state.”

So, we won’t know until tomorrow whether or not Tammy-B will become our first openly gay senator. But on the bright side: The polls have already closed in the race for Most Openly Inspirational Tear Factory, and TAMMY BALDWIN WON BY A LANDSLIDE. Here she is talking about how dreams DO come true, little unicorn!

“I remember graduating from college, being very interested in public service yet wondering what I could aspire to be,” she said in an interview. “It was that year [1984], when I graduated from college, that Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice-president, and I watched in my first efficiency apartment, a little one-room place. I choked up and I thought at that moment: I can do anything. I can aspire to anything.”

And though Baldwin is clear about the fact that her sexual orientation doesn’t, and shouldn’t, define her political career (“It almost never comes up,” she says), here’s what a Baldwin win might mean—in real terms—for all LGBTQ Americans and allies:

“If you are not in the room, the conversation is about you. If you are in the room, the conversation is with you. We never had an openly LGBT member of the US Senate, and even though there are strong pro-equality allies who serve there, it has always been a conversation about a group of people. So this changes everything,” she said.

It could also change the landscape far beyond Washington, Baldwin said.

“I think in particular for young LGBT youth, especially those that come out in hostile communities or less supportive families and are thinking: ‘what about my future?’. They can wake up to a Tammy Baldwin victory on November 7 and feel the way I did when Geraldine Ferraro accepted the nomination.”

Sob. I would also like to say that Tammy Baldwin is my friend’s cousin and it is probably my #1 favorite name-drop. And I thought you guys might feel me on that. Because Tammy Baldwin.