i'm still waiting to see if my prediction is right. my three "optimistic guesses" (IN, MO and NC) are still up in the air right now, but if current leads hold IN and NC will be blue and MO will be red. that would mean i predicted only one state wrong and it would mean i got it more right than mr. rove. it would also mean that MO would lose it's status as the bellwether state.
y'hear that missouri? you'd better flip soon or people will pay even less attention to you from now on.
anyway, i had a good time poll watching last night. i managed to help between 3 and 4 people cast a ballot who otherwise wouldn't have. at least one of them was probably a mccain vote (judging from the stickers i saw on her car when i followed her into the parking lot to talk her back into the polling place). mostly things went extremely smoothly at my little precinct. occasionally, people from the campaign or independent floating observers would come by and tell stories about serious problems at a neighboring precinct (we got a few people showing up at our polling place who were turned away there) or other places in the region. like my 2004 experience, even though i spent much of the day standing around, it felt extremely satisfying. and it was fun to watch the pride of people casting a vote in such a historic election. more than one family took pictures of each other as they entered and left the polling booth.
and, of course, it didn't hurt that i really thought that obama was cruising to a victory. the results weren't all great. gerlach is going to remain my representative, it looks like proposition 8 will pass in california (though it still isn't certain yet), and stevens will probably keep his seat long enough to have palin appoint herself as his successor when he gets hauled off to jail (though the stevens race is also still technically up in the air). [UPDATE: it turns out it's not clear if the stevens to palin handoff would really work because of some confusion in alaskan law. but palin could run in the special election] and i'm still biting my nails over the franken-coleman race, which doesn't look too great right now. but, it really was a fun day, a long exhausting fun day. but still fun. and it was nice to go to an election party last night that didn't end as a total downer.
