One was the son of a Kenyan whose election broke barriers for African-Americans.
In this fiercely waged election, longstanding barriers were challenged and toppled, at times to the seeming surprise of the person doing the toppling.
In a sweeping election victory, barriers were broken, glass ceilings shattered and dreams realized, and the upstream struggle for LGBT equality suddenly felt like a fantastic flume ride at the amusement park.
But the night did usher in a handful of Democratic women whose elections broke barriers and made history.
Unfortunately, we have received reports of local election officials' erecting barriers to students who want to register and vote in their college communities.
In another unpopular move, the board rejected the idea of choosing board members by online election, citing as barriers the cost and the difficulty of preventing fraud or capture by specific interests.
From that perspective, the results of Tuesday's Knesset vote in Israel can, tortured analogy aside, be considered the "separation barrier election".
All this meant that black America knew that, contrary to the New York Times headline following the election, "the racial barrier" had not fallen with Obama's election; it had become a selectively permeable membrane, though that in itself was reason enough to do the Electric Slide in the streets.
Ms. Babic said her victory in the Oct. 7 elections broke multiple barriers, from bigotry against women in a traditionally male-dominated society to stigmatization of the hijab that originated under the Communist regime that ruled from 1945 until Yugoslavia started to unravel in 1990.
Her election "broke a barrier and made it much more acceptable for women to take a leading role as leaders of the entire community, not just women," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and a former adviser on faith issues in the Obama White House.
