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.

Like most Democrats, I’m in a pretty good mood today, and expecting a very good evening. But I did read something this morning that set my teeth on edge, which I might as well get out of my system before the inevitable reconciliatory post-election period sets in.
In an article laying out a variety of scenarios going forward, the venerable Carl Cannon includes this one:

The nation experiences another relatively close election, its fifth in a row if you factor out the muddying presence of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. In the end, Barack Obama wins a clear-cut victory. The Electoral College follows the popular vote, which most likely would mean that Obama wins in the neighborhood of 52-46, with Bob Barr and Ralph Nader picking up 2 percent between them, and with at least 350 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic ticket. In a gracious concession speech, McCain does not allege that media bias defeated him, and extends a hand of friendship to Obama. During the transition, President-elect Obama reciprocates by offering McCain a cabinet position. On Inauguration Day, Sarah Palin announces her 2012 presidential bid.

What bugs me isn’t the electoral forecast, or the Palin ’12 reference, but instead, the idea that Barack Obama should make the gracious gesture of offering John McCain a cabinet post. Perhaps as a Christian and a national unifier Obama should forgive the nasty and borderline-racist tone of the McCain-Palin campaign down the stretch, but none of us should forget it. I certainly won’t.
I know that some Democrats, many pundits, and most Republicans wouldn’t agree with my assessment of McCain’s campaign, particularly the attribution of race-baiting. Maybe I’m just a race-sensitive white southerner of a certain age who always hears echoes of George Wallace in a certain kind of Republican rhetoic. But by the very end of this campaign, the racial undertones were pretty hard to ignore.
Through early September, when McCain was refusing to run ads on Jeremiah Wright, I thought maybe he really was the decent guy I’d always thought him to be on subjects other than war and peace. But then, when the financial crisis broke out, he embraced the obnoxious right-wing conspiracy theory that the whole mess was the result of an unholy combination of Wall Streeters, congressional Democrats, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, and ACORN, all under the aegis of the Community Reinvestment Act, who were determine to give shiftless poor and minority people mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.
Turns out that was just an appetizer. The entire Joe the Plumber minidrama–sort of a campaign within the campaign–was linked to McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialist” and “redistributionist” tax plan, which McCain finally began describing as “welfare” because low-income working families without income tax liability (but with payroll tax liability) would benefit, echoing a favorite tirade of Tom DeLay.
Now some people, even some Democrats, don’t think that was race-baiting, but rather some sort of rational argument about the macroeconomic effects of marginal tax rates on small business people. If that’s all it was, then it certainly didn’t make any political sense, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.

If, on the other hand, you think the Joe the Plumber gambit was not really about economics, but about race, it makes a lot of sense, as appealing to the ancient fear of a certain type of white (and usually male) working-class voter that Democrats want to tax them to give “welfare” to “those people.” At a time when virtually everyone figured McCain’s strategy was to peel off the kind of white working-class voter who famously spurned Obama in the Democratic primaries, with race clearly being a factor, it’s amazing to me that more observers didn’t make the obvious connection, particularly when McCain did the full monty of racial appeals by caterwauling about imaginary “voter fraud” threats.
Now maybe it’s all a coincidence, and John McCain happened to be simultaneously concerned about poor and minority people getting mortgages they didn’t deserve, poor and minority people getting “welfare” through the tax system, and poor and minority people stealing elections–all at the expense of the hard-working white man from the swing state of Ohio, Joe the Plumber. McCain never even mentioned race, after all. But for those of you old enough to remember the heydey of racial politics, that means nothing. George Wallace used to rant about “bureaucrats” forcing businesses to “hire a certain number of Chinese.” Everybody understood he wasn’t talking about Chinese.
So for my money, count me out on support of any immediate post-election love for John McCain, Sarah Palin (who went down this road before McCain, possibly encouraging him to follow), the McCain-Palin campaign staff, and the conservative commentators who encouraged the worst innuendoes of the Joe the Plumber theatrics. There are plenty of decent and honorable Republicans and conservatives in this country; let Obama and Democrats reach out to them first.

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.

One of the more interesting questions that will be answered tonight is whether the southeast will come home in terms of electoral votes. Of the four southeastern states with the most EV’s, one is trending blue (VA), two are toss-ups (FL and NC) and one (GA) is tilting red, but only slightly.
Among poll analysts, the pollster.com map projects the south staying red as a region, with the exception of VA. Chris Bowers’ final poll-averaged projection map at Open Left is a little more optimistic, coloring FL baby blue and NC pink, although his VA is baby blue. The TPM Election Central‘s map shows a blue VA, but toss-ups for the other three. Nate Silver’s map has VA safely blue, with NC and FL light blue, but GA red. Chuck Todd’s MSNBC map has a baby blue VA, a pink GA and toss-up gray for NC and FL.
The November polls suggest a blue tide may indeed be rising in Georgia. The final Insider Advantage poll, taken 11/2 and reported in the Southern Political Report, is calling a “dead heat in Georgia.” FiveThirtyEight.com reports that the Pew, Survey USA and Strategic Vision Polls all taken 11/1, a day earlier, have McCain leading in GA by 2, 7 and 4 points, respectively.
And clearly, the four largest southeastern states are very much in play in terms of candidate visits and ad investments by the Obama campaign.

Another good election night resource is a guide published yesterday by The American Prospect. Among its virtues is a section on ballot initiatives written by Dana Goldstein.
As Dana notes, there are two ballot initiatives on the subject of abortion. One, in CO, is so extreme an abortion ban that even cultural conservatives are divided on it; it won’t pass. But another, in SD, is a revised version of the abortion ban statute overturned by a ballot intiative two years ago. It incorporates some of the exceptions whose absence was the centerpiece of the successful campaign to repeal the earlier ban. And polls show a very close vote is likely. It’s mainly symbolic until such time, if ever, that Roe v. Wade is overturned. But it could be a dress rehearsal for what we’ll see across the nation if Roe ever does succumb to a slightly more conservative Supreme Court.
Other ballot initiatives include two (in CO and NE) representing Ward Conerly’s endless franchise operation aimed at banning affirmative action programs. And there are even, believe it or not, some progressive ballot initiatives, including a clean energy mandate in MO, and an animal cruelty ban in CA.
But as always in recent years, the biggest ballot initiative topic is on gay marriage. In AZ, in a parallel development to the abortion ban in SD, conservatives lost a ballot initiative in 2006 because its gay marriage ban would have also denied domestic partnership rights for gay and straight couples alike. Today’s initiative sticks to gay marriage, and may well pass. And in FL, a ban on both gay marriage and domestic partnerships appears to have majority support, but may well fail since the state constitution requires a 60% vote.
The huge ballot initiative fight, of course, is over California’s Proposition 8, aimed at reversing the state supreme court decision that legalized gay marriage in that state. Richard Kim has a good summary of that fight in The Nation today. Here’s a sample:

Right now, polls show the measure as a toss-up. The money is dead even too. When all is said and done, both sides will have raised more than $35 million each–more than $70 million in all–making it the second most expensive race of 2008, second only to the presidency. A sizable minority of this money has come from out of state: from gay activists, celebrities and business leaders on the No side; and from the holy alliance of Mormons, Catholics (the Knights of Columbus) and Christian evangelicals (Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and Elsa Prince, mother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince) for the Yes team. As California goes, so goes the nation.

We’ll see about that, but in any event, if the presidential race is called early, and you get bored with congressional results, keep a sleepy eye on the Prop. 8 results.

Gee, I wonder why big cities in swing states seem to be especially prone to voting machine malfunctions. But the shortage of machines may be the most powerful instrument of vote suppression, as MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow explains it in this clip at Ezra Klein’s American Prospect post on the topic.

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.