Over at the Century Foundation’s blog, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has some interesting observations on the November 4 exit polls, particularly with respect to the White Working Class vote:

They lost these voters by 18 points, a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points, but somewhat worse than I thought they’d do based on preelection polls. In my paper with Alan Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, we allowed as how Democrats needed to get the WWC deficit into the 10-12 point range to be assured of a solid victory. As it turned out, they were able to achieve a solid victory even with a higher deficit than 10-12 points. This is because the simulations we were working with made pretty conservate assumptions about white college graduate support for Democrats and about minority turnout and support for Democrats. As it turned out, minority turnout and support were through the roof and white college graduates also exceeded our conservative assumptions. So an 18 point WWC deficit was in the end adequate for a solid victory, rather than a squeaker as I thought. And a 10-12 point deficit would have translated into a true landslide….
The stubbornly high deficit for Dems among WWC is mitigated by the fact that there are now far fewer of them in the voting pool. According to the exits, the proportion of WWC voters is down 15 points since 1988, while the proportion of white college graduate voters is up 4 points and the proportion of minority voters is up 11 points.
The Dems did manage a fairly solid 7 point improvement in their deficit among whites with some college, the more affluent, upwardly mobile and aspirational part of the WWC. But they only managed a 3 point improvement among the less educarted segment, those with only a high school diploma or less. So that held down their overall performance among the WWC.
On the state level, Obama did stunningly well among WWC voters in four of the five highly competitive states they won in 2000 and 2004 (MI, MN, OR and WI). The average WWC deficit for Kerry in these states in 2004 was 8 points. In 2008, Obama had an average advantage in these states of 6 points, a pro-Democratic swing of 14 points. In PA, however, the other highly competitive state the Democrats won in 2000 and 2004, Obama did worse than Kerry, losing the WWC by 15 points as opposed to Kerry’s 10 point deficit. But college educated whites in PA swung Obama’s way by 17 points, turning a 12 point ’04 deficit into a 5 point ’08 advantage.

Among other things, Ruy’s post provides yet another data point for the proposition that Obama really changed the demographic map in states where his presence, his ads, and his field organization, focused their attentions.

The national exit polls, as published by MSNBC, show a decisive Obama victory.
He’s up 56-42 among women, and 50-48 among men. He’s down 54-44 among white voters, but up 96-3 (!) among black voters, and 67-30 among Latinos.
He’s winning self-identified independents 51-45, and self-identified moderates 61-38.
And he’s winning younger voters as massively as we all hoped: 68-30 among 18-24 year-olds, and 69-29 among 25-29 year-olds. Among white voters under 30, he’s winning 57-41.
These exits will be “refined” as actual votes come in, so deeper analysis should be delayed until then, but it looks like Obama hit his marks.

MSNBC made a very early call of PA for Obama, with virtually no raw votes in, indicating that the exit polls were decisive. The other nets are holding off for now, probably just waiting for a respectable number of actual votes to make the call.
The symbolism of this result is pretty unmistakable, since PA was supposedly McCain’s breakthrough “Kerry state” to offset his likely loss in “Bush states” like IA, CO, NM and probably VA.
MSNBC has also called the NH Senate race for Jeanne Shaheen, perhaps the shakiest of the Democratic Senate candidates expected to take away GOP seats tonight.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In a final note on turnout levels today, here’s a striking note from MSNBC:

Americans were voting in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Missouri and Maryland.

The general buzz has been that turnout would approach 1960 levels. But 1920? That election, fueled not only by the extended franchise, but by reaction to World War I and polarized excitement about Prohibition, was one of the higher turnout elections in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, the idea that turnout in The Commonwealth of Virginia might reach 90% is especially symbolic. For many decades, Virginia legislated some of the most restrictive voter eligibility practices in the country, aimed not just at African-Americans, but at anyone who wasn’t a property-holder. The aristocratic guardians of the Byrd Machine are undoubtedly rolling in their graves.

At 7:00 EST, polls closed in VT, IN, KY, GA, and VA. The networks called VT for Obama and KY for McCain, but nothing else. This is a actually a very good sign for Barack Obama. If a McCain Comeback was truly developing, he’d be romping in IN and GA.

If you’re interested in following reports from around the country on screwups, skullduggery, and sheer chaos at voting places, check out One Vote Live, a blog maintained by the Election Protection Coalition. There’s already quite a backlog of Election Day entries.

Despite record levels of early voting (roughly double what we saw in 2004), Election Day is already replete with accounts of long lines at voting places all across the country.
In Washington today, anecdotal reports of extremely heavy turnout in northern Virginia are everywhere. It should be noted, of course, that Virginia is not a particularly strong early voting state, since it requires the fiction of absentee voting. But since election administrators typically adjust their expectations based on early voting levels, it won’t be surprising if we see long lines even in states where something like a majority of registered voters have already cast ballots in person or by mail. And before long, we’ll be hearing plenty of stories about foul-ups at voting places, and eventually, some dirty GOP tricks. It would be nice if they don’t matter.

As David Paul Kuhn of Politico notes, 13 of 14 national polls released yesterday show Barack Obama winning over 50% of the popular vote (the exception being the exceptionally unreliable IBD/TIPP poll).
Lest we forget, it’s been thirty-two years since a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of the popular vote. I’m sure President Jimmy Carter will be happy to see this long streak since his 1976 victory broken.

Nate Silver has a useful update today on polling of U.S. Senate races. He counts six Democratic pickups as very likely: VA, NM, CO, NH, OR and AK. Three others–MN, NC and GA–are rated as tossups, though like J.P. Green, he thinks Liddy Dole’s last-minute religious attack ad on Kay Hagan in NC could well backfire. In the case of GA, Nate figures close to even odds for a rare general election runoff.
KY and MS, while still plausible for Democrats, are not looking quite so good lately. But on the other hand, the one Democratic target going into this cycle, Mary Landrieu of LA, seems completely safe.
If all three toss-ups break Democratic, the party would reach the magical 60 votes in the Senate that would theoretically represent a filibuster-proof majority. But that’s only if you count the apostate Joe Lieberman as a Democrat. In reality, of course, a filibuster-proof majority is a vote-by-vote proposition that requires a difficult-to-achieve level of party unity. On the other hand, there are a few Republicans (Snowe, Collins, Specter, and if he survives, perhaps Coleman) who may well be reachable on some key votes.
All in all, it will be a very good election night for Senate Democrats, and we’ll really have to wait until January to see how it all shakes out in terms of the ability to govern.

Are you a voter in a non-battleground state and feeling a little out of the game? When the phone rings, do you hope against hope it’s one of those notorious robocalls trashing a political candidate?
If so, you’re in luck. There’s a web site sponsored by the National Political Do Not Contact Registry that catalogues and supplies links to every robocall they can find this year, not just at the presidential level but everywhere.
So if you’re feeling lonely and ignored in the final frenzy of this campaign year, download a few robocalls and imagine yourself being harassed.