.

Absolutely the case with me (although not with aff. action, and we didn't have any ballot measures in NC). I'm a registered voter, unaffiliated, but generally trend towards Democratic candidates (I think I was about 60/40 D over R in this particular election, for the partisan races). The two things I feel strongest about in terms of social concerns are (1) being against abortion, and in favor of life beginning at conception, and (2) equal rights for all, including homosexual couples. There's generally no way to reconcile pro-gay-marriage and anti-abortion in a single candidate... so I vote those issues when they come up individually.

DT - that TV story is from 1129 last night, since then the Sax percentage is down about 5 points.

Also, even when the counting is done if things are very very close on the 50%+1 threshold we still won't know for not one reason but two.
-- First, anything less than one percent can go for an automatic recount.
-- Second, I wonder how many people realize that write-in votes are not included in the totals we're seeing? Those aren't officially added to the totals until the vote is actually certified, which usually takes anywhere from 3-7 days. In other words, a few thousand of those could actually be the difference in a run-off or not.

I think, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, that the Dems are on 57 with MN, AK and GA still open. They'd have to win all 3 which is possible but unlikely.

Lieberman isn't a Dem anyway (I-Israel) so you should vote/root against Saxby regardless.

After sleeping on it, my facebook status this morning:

...thinks that the best thing to come out of last night may be the enthusiasm, the ownership, and the pride taken in America by so many.

Almost regardless of how you feel about the outcome, the sheer turnout this election makes me think that the country is going in the right direction; if you like democracy.

Sarah Palin perhaps?

No.

According to CNN, right now it's Obama 52 - McCain 46.

NC, IN, and FL are the only states that Obama will win where the difference is 2% or less.

If they want to run her in 2012, that would be the best move. She'd win that seat in a landslide. There's a lot of people who do like her as a person, but are concerned that her knowledge of federal/world issues is lacking. 4 years on Capital Hill would certainly help her knowledge base and put her in a much better position. It also won't hurt that if she runs for president, she won't have to worry about conforming her statements to the answers that fit John McCain's platform.

On the count I just completed working from the state SOS office, looks like 121 of 159 counties have not yet reported their absentees. Four of those also have between 1-3 regular precincts also unaccounted for, including heavily populated & strong D skewing DeKalb and mostly strong D skewing Fulton (odd county, from uber-GOP stronghold in the north to uber-Dem stronghold in the south, would have to know precisely which 3 precincts are missing to figure those).

Still, raw vote totals from all the outlying counties weighted evenly has the two nearly dead even, Martin by 8k over Chambliss out of over 2.5 million votes. More importantly, Chambliss has a 48.19% total in those counties while sitting at 49.859% statewide at the moment.

Unless the missing Fulton precincts are large and heavily Republican, it looks to me as though a runoff is the likely outcome when all the counting is done.

FWIW.

Again, many thanks.

Last question: How would you rate the chances of each candidate getting to 50+1 sans runoff?

If things run roughly to form and the info I'm taking from the SOS website is accurate? Pretty much 0% for Martin and maybe 1 in 5 for Chambliss, if & only if the missing Fulton precincts are large & heavily for him while the DeKalb's are small. And even then there's the write-ins to figure out.

At the moment I've got my doubts about the info I'm taking from the most official source available. In the past ten minutes or so the statewide total has changed (taking Saxby from 49.86% to 49.88%) but none of the counties showing as incomplete have changed by a single vote. Meaning either these don't quite add up properly or one of the counties listed as complete had a change either from adding in some previously untallied early votes or whatever.

I guess I will say my little piece on this. For the ones saying that the Republicans should dump the religious right, ect. ect., are getting it wrong. McCain is a moderate. Modern Republicans win big when they are far right, not moderate. Modern Democrats win when they are moderate, not far left. You are never going to "dump" the entire base.

thanks Jon. Nice to have someone on the ground there with their nose in it.

i deleted my link to the tv story after realizing the timestamp on it

Incidentally, the "Barr Effect" in Georgia? Virtually non-existent.
With 28,377 votes, he's got 0.7% atm.

By comparison Badnarik got 0.6% in 2004, Browne got 1.4% in 2000 (Buchanan had 0.4% the same year), and Browne got 0.8% in 1996 (while Perot took 6.4%).

Harry Browne > Bob Barr

Probably should have counted more on the "Buckley Effect" in the Senate race, as he's sitting around 3.4% of the total right now, leading toward a run off.

You do the same thing I do. You just see saw back and forth. I am sure that after 4-6 years of Democrat control, I'll be sick and tired of them and ready to vote Republican again.. If the Republicans are happy just waiting for the Democrats to lose the national elections instead of making a move to win over voters, then that is their choice I guess.

I don't for one second believe that Obama is going to be the next FDR or Kennedy or a democrat version of Reagan as people have tried to make believe. If he however is a second version of Clinton (without the scandals), it will be passable enough to keep Washington from Republican hands. From the tone I hear around here, the Democrats sound like everything will all be ok now, and it isn't. The economy is still a mess, the government is overbloated, there are too much taxes and our foreign image is a wreck. I can't imagine the next 4 years will be worse than the last 4 though, and if the Republicans insist on sticking to the Religious right, they won't get back into Washington the next two elections unless somehow Obama underperforms Bush which seems almost impossible.

Ping Bucc or one of our other Libs is about the best advice I can give you.

Listen, that's a really nice speech. But actions speak louder than words. You read this article about the man who is expected to be the White House Chief of Staff and you tell me what part of this man's actions even remotely indicate that he'll be a uniting force between the parties while in the White House.

The Enforcer : Rolling Stone

MSNBC estimates a 6% win for Obama...........^

This is what i was thinking as well.

That means you are probably wrong.

I will now feel free to ignore you, as fully 2/3 of your 800 posts in this thread were complete garbage proven wrong by the election.

never to be claimed.

Atlanta news stations are saying a runoff is official. One more chance to get rid of Saxby!

Feel free to ignore it, but it's certainly a valid point. I'm not claiming that the Republicans haven't put these kinds of people in certain positions, but the assertion that Obama can say those things and then assume that the other half of the country actually believes it is severely misplaced. Obama turned this election into a Bush referendum and McCain took the fall for it. That option will not be available in 4 years and he'll also have to explain why his 'unity' platform didn't pan out once he actually entered the Oval Office. Chosing a man like that to be in a high office does nothing for unity.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Bush transitioned pretty seamlessly from a "uniter not a divider" in 2000 to the most aggressively attacking convention in 2004 that I can remember. 4 years is a long time.

I think that pretty much pinpoints NY Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

9/11 allowed that option. He took that situation and ran with it. I'm not saying it's right, but that was the reason that he could get away with that. The fact that the Democrats picked a candidate as poor as Kerry didn't help either.

Quick Poll on CNN has you joining 7% of the country in your sentiment. Luckily that poll has a full pie of 100%.

Now with a +/- of say 10% your still way in the minority. However if you take a poll of the poll you find that they only sample 10 people and only 5 had cell phones.

Pretty interesting local development - Dem Mark Schauer narrowly topped 1 term Representative Tim Walberg in the 7th district of Michigan, which I mostly grew up in and live a few miles outside of now - close enough that I still got to see all the ads, of course. It's mostly interesting because of the history of the district and how bitter things got over the past 4 years.

Republican Nick Smith held down the seat from 1993 to 2005. Plans were set in motion for his son, Brad, to take the seat upon his retirement, but shortly before he retired, House leaders (Delay) tried to blackmail him into voting for a Medicare bill by dangling a carrot of major financial support for his son. When he not only called their bluff but went public with the scandal, the RNC dumped a lot of money into an opponent's campaign for the primary and the seat went to Joe Schwarz in 2004. Then in 2006, the Club for Growth (a fairly far right wing PAC) came in and backed a more extreme candidate in the primary, in Tim Walberg. He sank Schwarz and got the seat in '06. How extreme? Extreme enough that defeated Republican Schwarz actually endorsed Democrat Schauer this time around, and that may have been the difference. It's the first time Michigan's 7th has gone Blue in an election since 1990.

Seriously, the fact that people have continued through this thread to paw at this dude's yarn is just a source of complete mystery to me. Just now realizing that this guy offers no value added? Wow. But welcome aboard, I guess.

There's a poll concerning his Chief of Staff? Link?

PA 3(used to be PA 21) has been red since 1983. Phil English finally ate that one cheeseburger too many, and managed to lose to some concerned mom. Granted, his margins were getting smaller each time. This was Tom Ridge's seat.

I just wish that if/when you ignore someone, that the other peeps would quit quoting him. Right now the ignore list is useless cause of this.

I find it intriguing that people are so bothered by open discussion that they actually have to ignore a poster. I don't agree with everything posted in this thread, but ignoring other people's opinion seems like a poor option. Given the overwhelming liberal nature of this forum, I would think that in the interest of unity they would want to hear all opinions, much like their party leader.

Hypothesis:

The housing boom of the last 5 years moved a lot of 'urban' or middle class people to the 'burbs' via easy money and easy mortgages and that new influx of people in the 'burbs' allowed the democratic party to gain a foothold in areas that were usually GOP strongholds or at least red in the last 2 elections. discuss?

I smell the sarcasm AND it wouldnt matter since you completely discounted polls eventhough you have a big pile of poll crow sitting in front of you. It would seem however, youve dumped your entire pail of red paint on the pie.

The problem isnt the want to ignore you but the fact that youve been wrong, have empirical evidence that you were wrong and yet you still, contrary to your earlier claim in this thread, have been unwilling to claim it.

He still thinks Missouri will win the Big 12 championship.

Incorrect. The electoral predictions were actually very good. With that said, that wasn't the focus of my point. In the key battleground states, there were some weighting issues that I brought up. As was evidence in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia to name a few, the polling data was proven incorrect, which was my only objection to the polling data. The errors in polling didn't sway the state results, but they were definitely off. I also mentioned that the polls proved to be correct in Pennsylvania, which was the one state where the weighting was proven to be correct.

It's certainly possible, though I like our chances against Tech far more than against OK or UT.

Pennsylvania was the one battleground state where it appears the weighting was correct. Obama and McCain both were WAY wrong in their internal polling.

The electoral predictions, by you? Very good?

huh? On this very page you said 2-3 alone, and that was very wrong. If you want to parse data to somehow cobble together that you were accurate you can try but no one, no one, in this thread will see your statements as anything but revisionist history.

You were wrong and your next post for your own credibility should be this, feel free to copy and paste:

"My predictions were wrong and my speculation about polling data was also wrong and my attempts to make pre-vote data seem like it was spun was also wrong."

BTW, this Pres. election was a landslide.

Reagan/Mondale was a landslide. This isn't anywhere close to a landslide.

The sentiment towards the very few non-Obama supporters in this thread is definitely in contrast to the quote from the Obama speech above.

% Turnout of voting-age population hasn't been over 55.3% since 1968. Preliminary results are that 64.1% turned out for this election. The website I'm checking didn't have data from before 1960, but that would be more than any election listed (1960-2008).

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

I'm not an Obama supporter (didn't vote Republican either for President), and I don't feel anyone has been rude to me. I think alot of the responses MBBF gets, he directly calls for with the way he posts in absolute certainty and can never be wrong about anything. Likewise I have a few issues from several on the Democrat supporting side in this thread for the exact same thing though (such as Flasch's posts just drive me crazy). You all are big boys though, so if you can dish it out, I don't see why you shouldn't expect to receive it as well.

There were predictions of double digit wins in those states when I was complaining about those polling numbers. If those numbers were revised down in the days before the election, then you're absolutely correct that they revised their formula at some level and produced more accurate results. There were predictions of 11-12 point wins in places like Ohio. I said they were horribly out of line.

That is something that is good to see. I just hope that it is not a one time thing due to increased hatred for Bush, or the chance to try to put either an African-american or a woman into the white house. I hope it is an active part of the population seeing there are issues in the country, and it is no one's fault other than the people who vote or chose not to vote. I hope two things occur from this.. 1) They continue to increase in turn out rate , and 2) They look to become informed voters and we reduce the number of people who vote straight party line republican or democrat just because they feel they are supposed to.

That's fabulous stuff. I really hope that interest continues to grow and doesn't just show a one-time spike.

I agree. And actually, looking at the summation of Bush's statement this morning, I was somewhat gratified/impressed that his statement essentially referenced this. And by "this" of course I mean the increased turnout and the "health of our democracy" bit

I'd say the recent economic crisis probably played a big part in upping turnout, not that I discount the other factors you mention. I would be happy if your two hopes occurred, but I can't say I think it will happen.

EDIT: And for what it's worth, whatever the actual reasons, I'm happy to see such a high turnout.