Crowds are gathered tonight in The Chapel in San Francisco's Mission District to watch election results from around the country.
San Francisco Public Press reporter Rosie Bultman is there.
BULTMAN: The vibe in The Chapel is really lively. There's been many moments of people getting up out of their seats and cheering with their hands in the air when Democrats have been projected to take over different House of Representative and Senate seats. Cocina Root is doing a great job of keeping things light and humorous. It's not a watch party that's hosted by a politician with a lot of activist groups or advocacy groups or political organizers in attendance. You really get a sense that this is a neighborhood event with a lot of regular people that might not even describe themselves as super political or super politically involved. People are way more invested in the national results.
One person told me that the reason for this was that she sees a lot more issues on the national level. She thinks things are going fairly okay locally, and when things start to go really wrong and start to stress her out, like the threats of wars happening either on U.S. soil or us waging wars in other countries, those are the sorts of things that ring her alarm bells and tell her that she needs to start paying attention.
As for the local measures, most people were concerned about transit and the Great Highway. Proposition H and Measure RTM funding Muni and BART were important issues to people. People didn't want the stations near their house to close down. And a lot of people really enjoy Sunset Dunes Park, and they don't want it to be reopened to vehicles, though some of them described that as maybe selfish, they said that it was a priority for them to keep that park as a park.
