a video to rev you up for the moment

November 4, 2008: the recap.

somewhere in middle America

Barack Obama wins another electoral vote. Whose electoral vote, you ask? Omaha, Nebraska's.

landslide

North Carolina called for Obama, bringing his EV total to 364. Sorry Mike.

Doggonit

Hysterical.

Condi Rice almost giddy over Obama victory

I've never been a fan of hers, and have never really understood how she managed to serve the entirety of both Bush terms in high-level, high-responsibility in the White House, presiding over both the military and eavesdropping bait-and-switches of Bush's duplicitous and belligerent first term as head of the NSA, and the domestic policy catastrophes of his bumbling second term as Secretary of State, and yet has so far survived with her reputation almost perfectly intact. Nevertheless, the look on her face here, described by Salon's Joan Walsh as "like a little girl on Christmas," is pretty remarkable.

lines and lines...and lines

Enjoy these photos. Your kids will look at them in their history books. I'll drop a prediction thread pretty soon. I was planning to say Obama by 5, but I'm starting to think that's unrealistically low. It's certainly pessimistic compared to the polls.

Sap voted this morning at 10am, and still had to wait in line. Neither of us have ever seen a line at our voting place.

the big day

So here we are, folks: the end of the line. Currently poll aggregates for all states and all races can be found at pollster.com, and TPM has a list of poll closing times and an interactive, constantly updated electoral map.

Nate Silver has a great rundown in Newsweek of the order of poll closings and what to watch for. Here's a brief synopsis:

6pm: polls close in Kentucky. KY is going for McCain, but there's a humdinger of a Senate race between Bruce Lunsford and current Senate Minority Leader and architect of Republican obstruction Mitch McConnell. Current polling has McConnell up by 3, but if Lunsford pulls the upset, the door is open for Democrats take a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate.

7pm: Virginia, Georgia, New Hampshire, Indiana. Indiana technically closes at 6, but there's a handful of heavy-Obama counties in Central Time. If Virginia (currently at +5.5 Obama) goes for Obama, he only has to hold PA to take the presidency, and if it goes early, McCain's chances become extremely remote. Obama should be helped in a reverse-coattails fashion by Mark Warner's impending 30 point demolition of the hapless Jim Gilmore in the VA senate. If Indiana (at +.5 McCain) goes for Obama, we're looking at a landslide. If Georgia falls to Obama (+3 McCain), he may get 270 electoral votes before the polls close on the West Coast. Georgia holds the second toss-up Senate contest with uber-slimeball Saxby Chambliss (currently up 4), again opening up the possibility of 60 seats if he goes down to Democrat Jim Martin. A more likely Dem Senate pickup can be found in NH, where former Dem governor Jean Shaheen is on pace to smoke John Sununu.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, however, is at +15. He's going to win re-election in a walk.

7:30: Ohio and North Carolina. These are both must-wins for McCain; there is no hope for John McCain without these two electoral vote-rich states. Obama's up 4 in Ohio, and a late McCain surge has left NC in a tie. Also look for Kay Hagan (up by 4) to give NC Senator Liddy Dole the ol' heave ho.

8pm: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Missouri. If Obama has taken any of the previous battlegrounds and holds Pennsylvania (where he's up 7), he's going to win. Barack is up 16 in Michigan and down 1.5 in Missouri.

9pm: Colorado, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Minnesota. These are a likely Obama sweep, and if Obama has won Pennsylvania, Colorado (at +7 Obama) will be enough to put him over the top even without the early battlegrounds. Also watch for Al Franken to take down Senator Norm Coleman in MN, and a pair of Udalls to take Republican-held open seats in New Mexico and Colorado. Fun fact: if Obama were somehow to sweep the battlegrounds to this point, the 9pm states will give him 277 votes and the presidency.

10pm: Nevada, Iowa, Montana. Obama should be a lock for Iowa (+13 Obama), is ahead in Nevada (+7 Obama), and has a shot in Montana (+2 McCain). Silver calls Nevada Obama's "ace in the hole," as it, combined with Virginia and Colorado, would make up the difference in the unlikely loss of Pennsylvania.

11pm: California, Oregon, Washington. My expectation is that these will be called very soon after the polls close and that California will do the honors of giving Obama his 270th vote. Cally voters have a much closer vote to take care of in Proposition 8 which, if ratified, will ban same sex marriages in the state. They're currently legal in California by judicial decision, but the vote is dead even at the moment. Both Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger have come out against Prop 8, and Samuel L. Jackson and Ellen Degeneres have cut pretty outstanding ads against it.



Meanwhile, just up I-5, Jeff Merkley is likely to cast Senator Gordon Smith from his perch. If Smith's the 8th senator of the night to fall, expect the Democrats to get their 60 seats.

1am: Alaska. Ted Stevens, former President Pro Tempore of the Senate and recently convicted felon, is going down in flames. Expect Begich to win by more than 10, putting an ignominious end to the career of the man who has represented Alaska since it was a territory.

UPDATE: I forgot to add a note about Prop 8 and the Oregon Senate race in the 11pm slot. Added in bold.

this f**king election

Awesome.

I'm starting to believe

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic lays out the McCain campaign's argument for how they're gonna win:

The Republican Party has built a presidential election machine that is tested and proven, the argument begins. Its voter database, Voter Vault, has 150 million potential Republican voters listed, each with dozens of psychographic datums appended.

The Party knows how to turn out Republican voters in red states. The Democratic Party has no record of turning out sporadic Democratic voters in presidential years in red states. It is not reasonable to assume, therefore, that Democrats can really turn out the voters they say they will, while Republicans have a record of turning out habitual Republican voters. How can Democrats build good and accurate voter lists in these red states?

Take Indiana: Gov. Mitch Daniels leads his Democratic opponent, Jill Long Thompson, by a healthy margin. Can you imagine Mitch Daniels voters choosing Obama?

Obama's in trouble in Pennsylvania. Why else is Ed Rendell begging Obama to return there?

In 2006, the Republican base was depressed after "Macaca" and Jim Webb still only barely managed a victory there.

The GOP will spend $70 million on GOTV in the next 13 days.

Obama isn't breaking 50% in Ohio and Florida. It's hard to imagine a big shift to him in the final ten days, when the mind is concentrated, when imponderables come into play.

Colorado is tough... but Pennsylvania is doable.

Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri will all revert to partisan form. Already, McCain's campaign has factored in census + 1 turnout for African Americans, and there are plausible scenarios under which McCain wins.

Several polls -- including McCain's internal polls -- show that some white male voters who broke away from McCain [ed note: but did not support Obama] are coming back to McCain's fold.

Oh, and all this talk of Barack Obama leading in the early vote? So did John Kerry.

Wow, this is weak. The McCain campaign just knows that Pennsylvania is doable, that Daniels voters won't vote for Obama, that states enduring huge demographic shifts will continue to vote exactly as they had before, that late deciders can't possibly vote for Obama. And if those obviously true conclusions prove not to be such, there's always the Republican supercomputers, which have a supersecret file containing roughly 30 million more Republican voters than the total number of people that voted for either president candidate in 2004. And they can read minds, too!

By the way, the last argument, the one about John Kerry winning the early vote? Demonstrably false: Bush won the early voters 60-40.

Does this feel like b.s. spun to keep from admitting they're screwed to anyone else?

McCain's endgame strategy

In the third debate, John McCain peppered his answers with old bromides like "redistribution of wealth" and "socialism" and, in a turn that most people considered damaging to his chances with the women vote, went on a brief tirade about abortion, gesturing scare quotes as he sarcastically intoned "health of the mother." When asked about the racist and eliminationist comments being spouted by his supporters in recent rallies, he defended his supporters vigorously, calling them patriotic Americans, not making even the slightest concession that things have gotten a little out of hand.

Sarah Palin commits another apparent gaffe a couple of days later, referring to North Carolina as one of "the pro-America areas of this great nation."

Then, two days after that, McCain himself makes the same mistake in Virginia, saying that, even though he's behind in the state as a whole, he's winning in "real Virginia."

And then today, McCain takes a racially charge turn for the worst, deriding Obama's tax plan as "welfare."

Yet despite all these supposed "gaffes," McCain has actually gained ground in the last 5 days, gaining from -12 to -4 in the indy vote and gaining 6 points among Republicans in the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll.

Can you see what's going on here?

It looks to me like the Hate Talk Express has decided to try to win the way Bush did it in '04: focus like a laser on conservatives. Return to the hard right rhetoric of the primary, rile them up, scare the hell out of them, and send them to the polls in the highest numbers you can. Use fear and hate to close the enthusiasm gap, rely on the high turnout rate of key conservative demographics and hope that once again blacks, young people, and women-- Obama's strongest demographics-- don't show up in high enough numbers to make up the difference. A judicious sprinkling of voter suppression efforts should be just enough to tip the scales.

There is obviously a case to be made that this tactic won't be enough. For one, Democrats have registered millions more new voters than the Republicans, so there may be too few conservatives put him over the top. Also, at the moment the enthusiasm gap is still much wider than it was in '04. Then there's the issue of Obama's wicked ground game and huge money advantage. McCain's tactic could backfire in a way that Bush's didn't; for instance, there's a chance that his "real VA" remark could boost turnout among Obama voters and leaners in Virginia incensed at the slight (say what you will about W, but he would never have made that mistake). There's the economy. There's Sarah Palin, whose potentially proximity to the presidency scares the bejeesus out of a lot of people.

And, of course, there's Barack's superior strategizing. Powell's endorsement was rolled out at the best possible moment to blunt McCain's case to conservatives, and he's been far more effective than any Democrat I've ever seen at working the media. McCain, on the other hand, can't even keep his own operatives from hyping a Powell endorsement before people leave work for the weekend.

David Brooks goes way, way off message

What the hell is going on?

don't trust him

There's a rumor flying around that Colin Powell is going to endorse Barack Obama on Press the Meat this Sunday. From Politico:

The general’s camp is being coy about what he might or might not say on Sunday. But some McCain advisers suspect, without being sure, that Powell will endorse Obama.

“It’s going to make a lot of news, and certainly be personally embarrassing for McCain," a McCain official said. "It comes at a time when we need momentum, and it would create momentum against us.”

McCain officials are actively talking to the press and saying they think he'll endorse Obama? Maybe I've become too obsessed with strategy. Maybe my opinion of Colin Powell's independence and judgment have sunk too far below the truth. Maybe I'm giving the McCain too much credit. In any case, I find it very difficult to believe, not one week after Powell testified to the sterling word of honor of Ted Stevens, that he would then go on MTP and endorse Barack and that McCain's own officials would be the ones to make a story out of it on the preceding Friday.

If this story turns out to be true, John McCain is running the worst, most undisciplined campaign in history.

UPDATE (SUNDAY NIGHT): My mistake. Apparently McCain is, in fact, running the worst, most undisciplined campaign in history:

the camera is a cruel mistress

This image has made my day.

it worked

Remember the trap I was talking about yesterday?

Here's a screen cap of indy voters' reactions to McCain leveling the Ayers charge:


And here's the response afterwards:


Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post:

Now we know why Obama’s aides were goading McCain earlier this week to raise the Bill Ayres issue in the debate. They wanted to play McCain’s rage against Obama’s measured, judicious, statesmanlike, even a bit boring presidentiality. And McCain obliged them big time.

There's something else about McCain's answers in these debates that I noticed on a visceral level watching the replays, something that reminded me of the debates I've had that left me thinking less of the other person, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Andrew Sullivan provides the assist:

At no point have we seen a grace note from McCain. When dealing with the negativism of the campaign, it would not have killed him to seem genuinely horrified at calls for violence rather than offended that anyone dare criticize him or some of his supporters. Or to wish Obama well. It's this lack of generosity of spirit that he lacks and that people want in a president. Obama still manages to say when he agrees with or admires McCain. In this whole dynamic, Obama seems more secure, more self-controlled, more mature.

The ability (or lack thereof) to make concessions in a debate can actually say a lot about a person. It conveys the "generosity of spirit" that Sully is talking about, impressing upon the other person that you're really listening to them, that you're trying to be objective about the issue and not just advocating for your side. It also shows that you're big enough to admit when the other side has a point and not to take their opposition personally. And, frankly, in these debates it separates the men from the boys, the master debaters who are thinking on both the macro and micro level, from the jokers who don't bother with things like "focusing on a theme" or "working the crowd," thinking you win debates by scoring the most points.

As much as I hate the tactic of arguing by analogy (especially sports analogies), a poker analogy is irresistible here because it's just so damn apt: it's like Obama and McCain are at a poker table, and McCain is the aggressive novice trying to win every hand. Meanwhile, Barack often folds when his cards aren't as good, and wins the big pots by baiting McCain into overplaying his hand.

CBS snap poll: Obama won by 20%

I read one poll analyst who said: "we're getting into dead girl or live boy territory here."

Jim Poniewozik from TIME:

Um, Sen. McCain, women don't like it when you put "health of the mother" in air quotes.

Oy, that one might smart in the morning.

Barack the bullfighter

Does anyone else get the feeling that the "John McCain won't say it to Obama's face" argument coming out of several quarters is a coordinated attack from the Obama campaign? And do any of you get the feeling that they're setting a trap, appealing to McCain's inner belligerent, "honor"-obsessed narcissist to get him to level the Ayers charge on national TV? Do you think this means that they've polled it and found that people would be turned off, especially if countered with a classic Obaman "he's trying to distract us from the real issues" parry, or has the Obama campaign devised a special retort that they're saving for prime time?

Obama vs. Osama

A scary, and very plausible, thought via fivethirtyeight, probably the best polling analysis site on the intarwebs.

to all of you who chose "my friends" as the trigger for your drinking game...

...I hope someone was around to relay your address to the paramedics.

the evolution of John McCain's health care program

Now with Medicare and Medicaid cuts! That'll help people pay for medical costs!

Krugman goes to town on McCain's plan as well, and Atrios calls it "pretty much The Worst Fucking Idea Since Invading Iraq." Hard to disagree.

But the important question is what that one guy Obama served on a charity board with was doing when Obama was in elementary school.

goldfish memories

For the second time this campaign, I'm starting to hear/read an awful lot of people getting complacent that Obama will hammer McCain on election day. This comes right as McCain unveils a massively negative campaign like the one that severely lowered Obama's number a couple of months ago, and the one that lauched Hillary's comeback a couple of months before that.

Supposedly this time we're going to see something different: a strong negative retort from Team Obama along Keating 5 lines. Hopefully this at least shows that Obama and the Democrats have learned an important lesson from '04 and from earlier this year: if the opposition successfully makes the election about you, you lose. The message from here on out should be: John McCain is the wrong guy to fix the economy.

In any case, despite how everything appears at the moment, I for one fully expect this race to tighten as McCain's incessant hammering dampens support for Obama.