6.30am – I’m up, MSNBC is on, and the kid is tethered to the leg of the changing table in her bedroom. The rest of the entries will be below the fold to prevent people’s heads from exploding – but I was just reading that in Georgia, 1,994,990 people have already voted during early voting and the total Georgia turnout from 2004 was 3,301,875. Holy crap. Keep an eye on Georgia tonight.
(I took out the embed code for the pollster graphic b/c they are having traffic issues today – although you can go to their website here, to see the trendline)
8.25am – Rachel Maddow points to the long voting lines and calls them the “new poll tax.” Time is money the old saying goes and it is wrong that in this modern world that people are having to wait, sometimes, upwards of 9 hours to cast a vote. I think it’s time for some sort of federal oversight when it comes to making sure voting resources are apportioned fairly.
8.36am – My predictions: Obama wins the 2004 Kerry states plus, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida and gets to 55%+ of the popular vote.
8.57am – The Pistons trade Billups/McDyess for Iverson last night. Most people seem to be bashing the Pistons but I don’t see it – sure, its not a blowout deal for the Pistons but Iverson gives them a lot more juice than Billups did and its not like Chauncey was Jason bleeping Kidd or something – Iverson is every bit the distributor Chauncey is, he just has a bad reputation, and now they have a whole new level of spurtability.
12.33pm – How are people’s voting experiences today? My wife was at our polling place before it opened at 7.00am and she waited 40 minutes before she had to get out of line and go to work. She’s gonna try again after work but I’m guessing it’s gonna be even worse then. Another one of my friends went early today in Maple Grove – he’s never waited before but today he had to wait about 20 minutes.
1.01pm – last night in Virginia, “Fired up and ready to go!”
1.44pm – I just got back from vouching for my neighbor’s eligibility to vote in our precinct. She just moved here from California and she doesn’t have her driver’s license or any utility bills yet. I didn’t ask her who she was voting for, but when we got to the polling place she told me.
One more for the good guys.
2.09pm – Nate Silver, founder of 538.com has penned an election night viewers guide in Newsweek. The short takeaway is that at 6pm cst, the polls will close in Indiana, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. If Obama wins any of those states it is all but mathematically over.
3.20pm – Via talkingpointsmemo.com, a voting story from Maryland:
My polling place is at the fairgrounds in Southern Maryland, about 40 minutes from Washington, D.C. This used to be tobacco country, but is slowly being developed, or other crops are grown. We waited until 10:00 to vote, to avoid the lines. When we got there a 97-year-old Black man was being wheeled out of the polls in his wheelchair. It was the first time he had ever voted in his life. When he came outside he asked if anyone could give him an Obama button. There were none left at the Democrat’s booth so I gave him mine. He was so proud and I started crying. He looked at me and said, “why are you crying? this is a day for glory.” I am still crying.
4.56pm – In the last 20 minutes I got a robocall from the Obama campaign asking me to do some last minute canvassing b/c their “data indicates the race is closer than anticipated” and Joe Scarborough, who was a republican congressman from FL during the 90s, said on live national television that his gop contacts in Florida told him over the weekend that there was no chance McCain was winning Florida – Obama’s early vote efforts had won the state before election day ever arrived. Talk about mixed messages.
7.07pm – Weis, the jerkstore called…
Anyway, we just got a bunch of states called – IL, PA, ME, NH, VT, CT, NJ, DE, MD, DC for Obama totaling 103 evs, and for McCain OK, KY, TN and SC, totaling 34 evs. So far nothing different from 2004 although most people though McCain needed PA this year to have any hope of winning. Currently the 2004 Bush states that are still up in the air are IN, OH, VA, NC, GA and FL.
7.41pm – MSNBC calls GA for McCain. Dammit. My first incorrectly predicted state tonight. It will be interesting to see what the final tally is in GA, from what I read all the metrics in the early voting pointed to an Obama win today.
7.50pm – Exit poll tea leaves – (although exit polls have been notoriously inaccurate during the last two cycles) According to the NC exit polls Obama is outperforming the 2004 Kerry vote among whites 37% to 27%. The FL exit polls show Obama winning hispanics by 10% while Kerry lost them by 12% in 2004 – how the hell is McCain gonna win FL if that holds true?
8.25pm – Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaw! The networks call Ohio and its 20 evs for Obama. The first 2004 red states flips to blue.
Turn out the lights.
8.33pm – Katie bar the door, NM flips from red to blue!
8.34pm – posits on Kent and Nagasaki being jerks to me! There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot going on during the daytime on tv or the tubes.
8.59pm – now that stuff is actually happening I am updating my live blog accordingly…The Rocky Mountain News calls CO for Obama but the networks are still holding off. That would be 3 red2blue states and counting…
9.02pm – Make it 4 r2b states – now Iowa gets called for Obama. And AZ remains too close to call. Teeheehee.
9.17pm – Chuck Todd, stud political director @ MSNBC says they are going to wait for all the votes to be counted in IN and VA and they won’t be calling a victor. Blah.
9.30pm – In MN with only ~10% reporting we have Franken up by 4%, Bachmann up by 3%, Paulsen up by 3% and the state sales tax increase for clean water up by 12%. Yay, clean waterways!
9.55pm – rumors floating that McCain will concede within minutes…
10.02-pm – History. MSNBC calls the presidency for Obama while Fox calls VA for Obama. VA hadn’t gone democratic since the ’64 LBJ landslide, today it gives its electoral votes to a 48 year old african american named Barack Hussein Obama. Can this be real?
10.08pm-
10.15pm – One of my favorite conservatives, Ross Douthat, on the moment:
So I was disappointed in Barack Obama, but I also realize that his campaign wasn’t addressed to me: It was addressed to the constituents of a potential center-left majority, and that’s the majority he won tonight. Whether this majority holds together will depend on how he governs, but for the moment he has achieved something that no Democratic politician has achieved in a generation: He’s carved out a mandate to take America at least some distance in a leftward direction, and he has left the conservative opposition demoralized, disorganized, and arguably self-destructing. Obviously, this achievement was made possible by the blunders of his predecessor, the floundering of the McCain campaign, and the good fortune of running against the incumbent party during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But great politicians are almost always lucky politicians, and Obama’s good fortune does not diminish the magnitude of his triumph tonight, and the credit that he and his campaign deserve for the race they’ve run.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that Obama has just been elected President of a nation in which he could have been bought and sold as a slave just seven generations ago. I don’t think there are any words adequate to the occasion of America electing its first black President, so I’ll just say this: This may be a bleak day for the Republican Party and for conservatism, but come what may in the years ahead, it’s a great day for our country. Barack Obama deserves congratulations, tonight, but so does the nation he’s about to govern: We’ve come a long, long way.
12.33am – Hah. Heading to bed shortly. One last update, as of now, there are 5 states outstanding. AK is too early to call. MT, MO, IN and NC are too close to call and according to 538 Obama has a shot at sweeping all four. From my amateur calculations though it looks like Obama will win IN and NC and lose MO and MT but I guess we’ll see tomorrow morning.