Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States of America. Pause a while and consider that. Absolutely amazing. What a country.
The mood around campus is incredible -- euphoric is how I'd describe it.
Euphoria, as CNN calls the election for Obama. At 8.00pm PST tonight, the west coast polls closed. The television networks immediately called California, Oregon and Washington for Obama, catapulting him from the low 200s, straight past the magic 270 vote mark.
10:05:42pm: Residual counts: Indiana might actually go for Obama. Missouri is pretty damn close too. Dems won't get 60 in the senate. Montana is surprisingly close.
8:03:50pm: over! CNN just called
7:05:58pm: Looks like a foregone conclusion. Of course, the networks aren't calling it yet.
6:33:15pm: I notice that Ohio has been called for Obama. That's big. 15 minutes of class left.
5:47:35pm: Stuck in a class, but it looks like things are going without too many surprises...
3:53:40pm: The Kentucky gap seems to be closing...
3:30:59pm: Indiana with about 20k votes counted in is 55%-44%. Kentucky is 36-62 (5.5k).
3:20:45pm: First election results are coming in. Kentucky, for example, is starting to report.
1:30:56pm: A series of
proposals on state law are also being voted upon today. Massachusetts is actually voting for whether they want to abolish income tax by 2010. (That's right, zero income tax in Massachusetts!)
1:27:56pm:
FiveThirtyEight.com writes:
"Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has taken a recent set of our simulations to look at what may happen conditional on the outcomes of the first states to close their polls at 6 and 7 PM [EST]. The bottom line? If those states go roughly as expected (meaning, say, an Obama win in Virginia and a close race in Indiana), we can conclude with almost literal 100 percent certainty that Obama will win the election".
Annoying, I have a class at 4.15pm PST, but if this is any indication, we could have a very clear idea of how things are going to go down by then.
1:18:18pm: The consensus among the students here is that an Obama victory is a foregone conclusion. I have heard from one or two people back in Australia who are not so certain.
Here's the GCC - sorry about the quality, the iPhone camera is crap. It looks like the lines earlier in the day have cleared out. There are some Obama placards around, but no McCain advertising.
12:51:41pm: The Graduate Student Center is a polling location and apparently there's a long line outside it. I'm going to swing by and check it out when I pick something up from home.
11:37:30am: Intrade is
currently showing that traders expect a 93.1% chance of an Obama victory and a 7.5% chance of a McCain victory. Their
real time election tracking page is calling the EVs 364-174.
9:45:48pm: To start us off, this
summary video is a great New York Times feature summarizing the lead up to today. For live election coverage online, here is a
good list of resources.
9:42:26am: I'm making this post a liveblog and will attempt to update it throughout the day. The law school here has set up the student lounge for election viewing with a big projector screen from 3-10pm and are keeping it supplied with food and drinks, so it sounds like a good place to camp out for the day.
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