That's a staggering number from the Bangor Daily News for an off-year election. My first impulse is to disbelieve it. The marriage results, by the way, remain neck and neck.
[Update: and yes, that number has now disappeared from the site. But the turnout does appear very strong.]
How easily we forget. We get caught up in the health insurance fight, we game the Beck-Palin subculture, we chatter about Israel and Iran, we obsess about marriage equality … while the voters who do not do politics for a living are simply trying to survive one of the worst downturns in history. The votes tonight are anti-incumbent votes in protest at economic crisis and the slow pace of recovery. And they are not, it seems to me, some national referendum on Obama's first nine months. In fact, Obama's approval ratings in both Virginia and New Jersey are respectable and strong, with unemployment headed to 10 percent:
About half the voters in Virginia and a majority in New Jersey – 49 and 58 percent, respectively – approved of the way Obama is handling his job. Most in both states, moreover, said the president was not a factor in their vote.
Perhaps most striking – though simply confirmatory of national polls – were economic views. A vast 89 percent in New Jersey and 85 percent in Virginia said they're worried about the direction of the nation's economy in the next year; 56 percent and 52 percent, respectively, said they're "very" worried about it.
Voters who expressed the highest levels of economic discontent heavily favored the Republican candidates in both states – underscoring the challenge Obama and his party may face in 2010 if economic attitudes don't improve. The analogy is to 1994, when nearly six in 10 voters said the economy was in bad shape, and they favored the out-of-power Republicans by 26 points, helping the GOP to a 52-seat gain and control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.
The Dems have a year to get economic recovery reflected in the polling. And the point about health insurance reform – the critical point that needs to be hammered home – is that it will reduce insecurity in very troubled times.
It's mighty close, with the pro-marriage equality forces currently a smidgen ahead with 17 percent of precincts reporting. The medical marijuana law looks like a sure-fire win.
Two high-ranking commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen are mauled to death by a bear.
CA-10 has gotten almost no attention because it is considered a safe Democratic seat, even though it has gone to a Republican much more recently than NY-23. Nate Silver gives odds:
I might take about a 15-1 flier on Harmer — and if Republicans do win here, or perhaps even pull close enough that the outcome will be uncertain for several days as California finishes counting mail ballots, they'll really have something to crow about. With that said, I suspect that Garamendi will more likely than not win by larger than the 10-point margin that SurveyUSA projects. By the way, this race is not without upside to the Democrats, as Garamendi should be significantly more liberal than Tauscher, who has not always been a reliable vote for her party on issues like national security.
The exit polls are very clear and, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. A reader writes:
How in the world can the pundits (even Megan or Marc, both of whom I like) honestly take results tonight as a referendum on Obama when:
1, Different people showed up to vote today than in 2008. It's apples to oranges to judge whether people like Obama's proposals compared to last year, when the number of young people, minorities etc voting is down. They don't like Deeds or Corzine etc but that doesn't mean they don't like Obama;2. Governors races send winners to state office, not Washington, so the candidates do not run against Obama and Washington. Indeed, McDonnell and Christie went out of their way to avoid conflict with Obama.
3. In exit polls, people said they liked Obama at about the same rate as they did last year, and also said that these elections were not a referendum on him. How much clearer can people be?
In the end, just because pundits want to make election more significant than it is, doesn't mean it is.
Watch the pundits do the dance, led by Rove, the worst political analyst in a generation.
Get your actual voting tallies live here.
Lexington sums up an argument, coming from various quarters, on the consequences of the GOP doing well today:
It could make it harder for Mr Obama to get his agenda through the Senate. Democrats from red and purple states are nervous enough already. If they think voters are recoiling from Mr Obama's policies, their support for him will grow more guarded and conditional.
And we now have news that the Senate Democrats may be unable or unwilling to move a health insurance bill until the new year. Marc goes further:
[The 2009 races will] determine whether Democrats believe they'll be punished or rewarded for favoring an Obama-identified health care plan.
Megan makes the same point:
Either Hoffman will lose, in which case the strategy of policing the party will lose some of its appeal, or he will win, in which case Blue Dog democrats and Republicans in squishy states will probably tack right–a critical win during the health care debate.
the Organizing for America (OFA), an arm of the DNC, has not lobbied against the anti-equality bill in Maine and sent out a message urging people to vote but omitting any mention of the marriage issue. Greg Sargent has more:
The reason this could become a real issue for OFA is that the vote on the Maine initiative — which would repeal gay marriage — is expected to be super close. And a loss — particularly one rooted in turnout, which OFA has the capacity to boost — will result in fierce recriminations. What’s more, tensions are already so raw because of a host of other ways gay advocates feel let down by the new president that they may be even more inclined to point a finger at OFA in the event of a loss. This one could get ugly.
It is staggering to me that the message discipline from the DNC is so tight that they even forbade OFA from telling Obama-supporters which way to vote on the referendum. It's one more sign, I fear, that the Democratic establishment's opposition to marriage equality is real; and the president's peeps are increasingly determined to do what they can keep us from the right to civil marriage.
Mark Blumenthal offers his final thoughts on what we can expect tonight and advises not taking exit polls very seriously. He's unsure about Maine:
A 2004 paper by Joe Shipman, then director of election polling for SurveyUSA, showed that polling on ballot measures had triple the rate of error (9.5 average error on the margin) as polls in presidential elections (3.4) and nearly double that of contests for statewide offices (4.6). I summarized the assumed reasons for that greater error rate in a long post four years ago today, but the most relevant to Maine are a greater difficulty modeling the likely electorate and the problem of accurately conveying ballot language.
Silver is more positive about the Washington referendum. I'd say: look at the age of the voters in exit polls. An off-year election tends to attract the hardcore, and they tend to be older, which is why fears about Maine are well-founded.
The Dish 