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.

With all of the day before the election polls in, Pollster.com’s Steve Lombardo is hanging tough with a 311 EV projection for Obama (270 wins), with 227 for McCain. Lombardo is also forecasting a 6 point popular vote edge for Obama, nationwide, close enough to the 7-point lead predicted by Nate Silver and the final Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of LV’s (GQR believes it could be +9 points by tomorrow). Lombardo’s forecast is less optimistic than Bowers’ 338 EV’s, but all of the data points to a comfortable Democratic margin of victory.
It’s hard to imagine the emotional roller coaster the Obama family is experiencing with the sad news today of the death of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was so important in shaping his character. But she died knowing she raised, not only a future president, but a leader who has given hope and inspiration to millions.

Note: This item is crossposted from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee site.

Heading into Election Day, Democrats control 27 state senate chambers and 30 state houses chambers. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans control 20 state senate chambers and 19 state house chambers. The state senates in Tennessee and Oklahoma are currently tied, and as always, Nebraska elects a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature.
In 2006 and 2007, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee helped Democrats pick up 12 new legislative majorities. This year, Democrats in many states will be focused on consolidating control of the chambers we currently hold.
That said, experts currently list 11 chambers as pure toss-ups — seven or which are held by Republicans and only four of which are held by Democrats. We believe November 4th presents an excellent opportunity to continue to expand upon our success.

Read more…

Over at Swing State Project, DavidNYC has posted an extremely useful map and chart of poll closing times correlated with key House, Senate and state legislative races.
It also shows how early we could see decisive results in the presidential race. Polls close at 7:00 EST in Indiana (6:00 in the eastern time zone portion of the state) and Virginia, and at 7:30 in Ohio and North Carolina. Florida, Pennsylvania and Missouri close at 8:00 EST. If the networks call any of these states for Barack Obama, it will be very difficult for John McCain to win.

While most of the national attention has been focused on the presidential election, with some on the Democratic drive to make major gains in the Senate, a dramatic shift in the House looks increasingly likely as well. A rare second straight “wave” election for Democrats is now probable, and gains could possibly match or exceed the 31 seats picked up in 2006.
Four months ago I was on a panel with Cook Political Report House editor David Wasserman, and he was then projecting relatively modest Democratic gains in the neighborhood of 10 seats or so. As of his latest update, Wasserman’s now predicting Democratic gains between 24-30 seats. Just as interestingly, the Cookies’ analysis of battleground districts shows the extent to which the House map is being played out on Republican turf. Of 58 competitive races (defined as those that are leaning D or R, or are tossups), 42 are in Republican districts, and only 16 in Democratic districts. Even more astoundingly, 30 of 35 tossup races are in Republican-held districts.
As Democracy Corps has been showing all year in its polling of relatively vulnerable Republican districts, Democrats have maintained and then expanded an advantage in the top tier of 20 battleground seats, and are highly competitive in a second and third tier. Despite constant GOP efforts to identify House Democrats with the status quo, voters continue to perceive Republicans as the party resisting needed change.
What’s most shocking about the likely outcome of House races tomorrow is that as recently as four years ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington held that gerrymandering virtually guaranteed a Republican majority in the House until the next redistricting round after 2010. Even taking the low end of Wasserman’s projections for Democratic gains, we’d have Democrats holding a 259-175 margin in the House. That’s a hair under 60%. Amazing.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Poll analyst Mark Blumenthal posted an early update this morning on 15 polls he has been tracking, and he cites a “very slight narrowing” of Obama’s lead in “key battleground states.” As of about 7:00 a.m., his forecast of 311 electoral votes for Obama vs. 142 for McCain, with 85 ev’s still a “toss-up” remained unchanged. Blumenthal will post another update this evening reflecting polls coming in today.

One day out, Chris Bowers, who has followed Senate race polls closely at Open Left, is predicting a solid 7-seat pick-up for Dems. In his analysis, based on poll averages, he explains:

Polling shows that we are going to win Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia. Polling, plus huge early voting numbers, shows that we are going to win North Carolina and Oregon, too. Given that we aren’t going to lose any seats, that makes seven pickups. Overall, that gives Democrats 57 seats (with Sanders), plus maybe Lieberman, plus Biden as a tie-breaker. That will be enough to pass Obama’s agenda.

Bowers sees MN as “a real toss-up,” but has doubts about Martin winning a run-off in GA. (But hey, what if Obama and Sam Nunn campaign hard for him?)

In the counting-chickens-before-they-hatch department today, Politico’s Mike Allen has the first of what will soon be many comprehensive reports on the early buzz about key cabinet and staff appointments in an Obama Administration.
Get used to ignoring these things, for a while at least. Team Obama’s famously leak-proof character means there’s unlikely to be any hard information on their staffing plans until they are just about ready to be publicly disclosed. It also means that most “predictions” will be the result of uninformed if rational speculation, or worse yet, of self-promotion by candidates for high office who seek to offset their lack of influence with Obama by stimulating Beltway buzz.
Looking over Allen’s list, I see several that just leap off the page as laughably improbable. Within Obama’s campaign and transition operations, there are certainly plenty of veterans of the Clinton administration who remember the damage self-inflicted in late 1992 by public jockeying for jobs among Democrats. I seriously doubt we see anything like that if Barack Obama wins the presidency tomorrow.

While channel surfing very early this morning, I dwelled for a moment at Fox, and heard the usual cawing about the presidential race tightening. But unless I’m mistaken, the pre-spin there seemed half-hearted, as did the talk about an obscure Obama relative living in the country illegally.
We’re now finally at the point where polls have told us everything they have to say, and here’s Nate Silver’s assessment as of 3:00 a.m. today:

McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.
Related to this is the fact that there are now very, very few true undecideds left in this race. After accounting for a third-party vote, which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2 percent or so…I am showing only about 2.7 percent of the electorate left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. Even if John McCain were to win 70 perecnt of the remaining undecideds (which I don’t think is likely), that would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain’s winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place — because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will “tighten” substantially further — especially when Obama already has over 50 percent of the vote.

When it comes to the state-by-state contests, the situation is even clearer. All of the states that seem to be close at the end of this campaign–FL, MO, OH, NV, NC, IN and VA–are states that John McCain must carry. But even if he carries them all, he still loses.
To sum it all up, if McCain somehow wins, it will produce the largest demolition of the public opinion research profession since Dewey and Truman 60 years ago–perhaps even larger, since the two national pollsters of that era didn’t bother to test opinion during the last week in 1948.

Avi Zenilman’s Politico article. “Dems’ Firewall: Secretary of State Offices,” reports on a largely overlooked story of campaign ’08. As Zenilman explains it,

In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states.
The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio — where the difference between victory and defeat in the 2004 presidential election was no more than 120,000 votes in any one of them.

Dem secretaries of state in battleground states are now “better positioned” to prioritize voter registration and increase turnout and perhaps more importantly, to interpret and administer election law, adds Zenilman. His article spotlights the big difference Ohio Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has made in making it hard for Republicans to steal votes this year, and Seyward Darby has more on Brunner’s efforts in his New Republic article , “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
Zenilman credits an independent 527 group, The Secretary of State (“SOS”) Project for raising $500,000 that helped win ’06 secretary of state races for Democrats, along with ActBlue, which contributed $24,000 to help elect Democrat Mary Herrera to the SOS post in NM. The Project sees a good chance to elect Dem SOS candidates tomorrow in MO, MT, OR and WV.