Mickey Kaus has been calling this the "perverse" election for a while.

Bush's policies are unpopular, it seems. Especially his immigration policy. Americans don't like his amnesty plan.

So, if America votes in a Democratic House, they'll get the policies they favor, right?

Well, not so much.

Here it comes -- now America gets the Bush Amnesty Plan it didn't want.

Congrats, enjoy!

Millions upon millions of new Democratic voters! Hey, no problem, we're in the minority anyway, right?

Thanks to HotAir.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 PM | Comments (8)
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The subject matter of this report isn't funny at all -- six Afghan policemen ambushed by terrorists.

However, Jane Skinner's flub of the word "cop" is funny.

Via Steve Silver.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 PM | Comments (7)
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If you lost a comment just now, sorry about that. We were getting a nasty wave of spam coming through, so I renamed the comment script. (It takes the spammer robots about a week to work that out.)

As always, New Comments Thingy still works. Unless you're Rosetta and have been taunting it until it banned your IP, that is.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:28 PM | Comments (6)
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Here We Go! WIth 45% in, Steele is up by 6%.

Now: Up 50-48.

How the hell do you call this race against the guy who's winning ?

...

A special thread, just for this race.

Although I don't see it on Geraghty's site, a commenter says the Steele people say that call was hella-premature.

So hope remains there.

The Actual Votes: Currently Steele is behind by 1%, 50-49.

The Corner says Steele will not concede until all the votes are counted. Or, presumably, until enough are counted that he can no longer conceivably win.

Pardon the lack of hat-tips... doing all I can just to keep up.

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 PM | Comments (195)
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Sorry, I said I wouldn't do this. But maybe it makes sense to have specific threads for specific topics.

Allen-Webb. Razor thin. Ridiculously thin.

The good news here is that the big Dem-leaning areas -- the DC suburbs -- have already been counted and added to Webb's total. The bad news is that the outstanding precincts are... who knows. Barone ran them down. Some rural, some majority black, some Allen areas, some Webb areas.

There's no specific reason to think Webb will overcome this small deficit, but there's no good reason to think he won't.

Meanwhile, Talent leads McCaskill, but only with one third of the votes counted, and I fear that big Dem areas like St. Louis will be the late-reporters, as Detroit is in Michigan.

As I'm sure everyone knows, Lieberman won, by about nine points. Six points more than the exit polls claimed he was leading by.

So there's that six point skew towards liberals over-eager to share their pain and anger with polltakers.

I don't know why everyone cares so much about this one. It's a Democrat. Sure, it's a vote in favor of the war, generally, but it's a vote against judges and everything else.

Posted by: Ace at 07:58 PM | Comments (27)
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Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube now.

Nancy Johnson falls.

I thought this might be a realignment election, though I didn't say so. A realignment in this way: People will, at the national level, stop just voting "for the person, not the party." What does it matter if Nancy Johnson is a multi-term incumbent if she votes contrary to your basic ideology?

In the south, voters finally wised up and stopped voting for Democrats, by and large, just because they had traditionally done so. They began voting their basic ideology -- and gave Republicans control of the House.

What we're seeing now is the liberals smartening up, ten years later. Now it seems northeastern liberals aren't voting for the candidate, just the liberal party that represents their liberal views, and are purging all the semi-anachronistic Republicans from the liberal northeast.

The liberal parts of Ohio will do the same-- they also have corruption issue to compel them in that direction.

We are in the last stages of a move towards ideological purity in the parties -- don't bother running as a "liberal Republican" in the northeast anymore, they can get the real deal with a Democrat -- and nearly pure ideological purity in the federal representation of entire regions of the country. No longer will there be Democrats in the south (except for in black or Histpanic areas or cities), and no longer will there be Republicans in the north (except in rural or traditionalist blue-collar areas).

In a way, I suppose it makes more sense this way. But the nation is accelerating in its hardening towards ideological segregation, by party and by entire region.

Posted by: Ace at 07:18 PM | Comments (94)
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I know I said I wouldn't create more threads. I'll let the last one be the last election-update thread.

This one's for venting and recriminations. Even if we squeak by, this is not an especially good night. (Well, if we do squeak by, it will be a very good night indeed, but still.)

Posted by: Ace at 06:12 PM | Comments (135)
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Buchanan Holds In Florida, Negron May As Well: Possibly two more off the sure or possible R loss list.

Geraghty's Source... Sayd Allen's victory is "in the bag."

With 85% precincts in, Allen's ahead by 1%.

Burns, Barrow Both In Position To Win In Georgia: Burns more so. Barrow's at 50/50. A pick up of two Republcian seats in Georgia sure damn might be helpful if this gets closer than it looks now.

Chocula, Northrup Projected Losers: Northrup by about 4 points.

Chocula's bad news. If Indiana holds for Republicans in the ninth district, we may be looking at a limit-your-losses scenario where Republicans can still squeak by... or at least fall into the minority by just a handful of seats.

If we continue seeing the endangered Republicans all fall, then it's a stupid bloody Tuesday.

FOXNEWS JETTISONS EXIT POLLS: Barone announces they have reviewed exit polls results against actual tabulated votes in surveyed areas, and found a persistent six to eight point Democrat skew.

Confirmation Bias! With just over 5000 -- five thousand -- votes actually counted, MSNBC has no problem calling Maryland for Cardin.

Despite the fact that even among those 5000 votes, Steele has a 57-40 lead.

I guess MSNBC really buys into its exit polls. Because it simply has no votes in yet at this moment to make this kind of call.

I suppose it might be exit polls of African Americans... but still, those are exit polls. How do they know that blacks felt comfortable telling pollsters, "Yeah, that's right, I voted for the black guy, more or less just because he's black" ?

This strikes me as very, very strange. Barone usually gives reasons for these calls -- he'll say this or that county is a bellwhether, and it just didn't give enough votes to this candidate.

But 8000 votes? What?

Confirmation Bias? Remember that previous biases -- and bad exit polls -- can cause the news desks to call Democratic winners early, and yet take all night to call Republican winners.

The exit polls -- almost certainly off by six or seven points -- are part of the data-set that go into making these calls.

A Bad Night... and yet we could still hold the Senate.

We've lost the seats we expected to lose. All the seats we'd had serious hopes about holding (or picking off, as is the case with Michael Steele) are still too close to call.

Obviously, we'd like to be so far ahead that we could get some quick calls on these, but apparently not.

We need to hold Tennesse (likely), Virginia (iffy), and Missouri (who knows), or maybe lose one more of those and pick up Maryland, if we want a 51-49 majority with none of that "power sharing" bullshit we had when Jeffords flipped.

...

The Last Thread... Tushar thinks it's a good idea to stop making new threads, to just update in this one. Okay, fair enough. I'll just start putting updates above.

Casey, Menendez Projected As Winners... Kean actually is just behind by 4%, but I guess they know he just didn't do as well in his strong areas than he needed to do.

As a general rule, I'm not posting stuff like this, as I assume you can watch TV the same as I can. I'm more focusing on signs of of where this is all going.

Still, there you go.

Still watching Ann Northrup slip behind in KY, and Chocula slip more and more into projected-loser territory in Indiana.

On the other hand, Corker's up by nine at this point, and Burns in GA-12 is ahead, too -- perhaps one of the few Republican House pick-ups of the night, if he stays ahead.

BARONE: AT LEAST A SIX-POINT DEMOCRATIC OVERSAMPLE IN THE EXIT POLLS.

Just FYI. Could very well mean we hold Virginia and Missouri, maybe even by a relatively comfortable margin.

Anyway, this is shaping up, it seems, to be at worst a 52-48 flip-round in total vote share. Okay, at worse, 53-47. It's nothing like the blowout the exit polls were showing.

....
Another liveblog: Six Meat Buffet, too.

Dave From Garfield-Ridge is liveblogging too, and is especially concerned by the strong showing of Dr. Zaius in Indiana-4 (running on the Damn Dirty Ape ticket).

A couple of IRC chats have been set up. I don't know what these are, but the kids seem to think they're pretty cool.

ArmedGeek set up one for Ace of Spades readers:

host: lenny.lscode.net
port: 6667
channel: #aceofspades

Matthew Sheffield at NewsBusters set one up too:

live.newsbusters.org
irc server
link address is irc://live.newsbusters.org

I don't know what a damn word of those things mean, so don't ask me.

Turnout "Ridiculously High" In Montana For GOP... and more stuff at HotAir.

Why Allah is still citing exit polls, I don't know. Even if we're losing many races, we just don't seem to be losing by the margins of these exit polls. They seem too unreliable to even cite at this point as regards close races.

Posted by: Ace at 05:23 PM | Comments (168)
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Ann Northrup in KY was a very endangered Republican -- a Republican incumbent, but serving in a majority Democrat district.

She's losing.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that she's just barely losing -- again, not what would expect if these exit polls were even close to accurate.

They're simply not accurate. It's 2004 all over again.

Now, it would be a bad thing if Ann Nothrup loses (if she does -- it's hardly over, and there are absentees, etc.) but this simply isn't the sort of comfortable win for Democrats that would vindicate the exit polls.

Similarly, Negron... All tied up, with 10% in, in Mark Foley's old seat -- one counted on as a likely (almost gimme) Dem pick-up.

Again, we might lose each of these close races by a hair, and thus lose a lot of seats. But it's just as likely we win most of these races by a hair, and lose just a dozen or so seats.

Whatever -- the exit polls are garbage, and those close Senate seats you might have already been giving up on are either toss-ups or actually will show the Republican winning when real numbers come out.

And anyone who stays at home based on the media calling these contests early (based on exit polls, again) is a chump.

Posted by: Ace at 05:08 PM | Comments (34)
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Whatever happens, AZ conservatives have to turn out to vote. Some polls show John Kyl with only a slight lead. Others show him more comfortably ahead, but there is some chance he could lose.

If dispirited Republicans decide not to vote in AZ, they just might turn a Senate retention into a Senate loss by giving up a seat that could have, and should have, been won.

Whatever happens anywhere, we need to keep that Arizona seat.

Don't be put off by claims that "it's over." It's not over -- they sort of have to actually count votes before it's over (and, in some cases, count them several times).

Don't be a sap and fall into the trap of staying home just because Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann told you to.

ALF Reminds Me... the same is true of Idaho, Colorado, and of course Montana, where Burns could still win.

Video of FoxNews All-Stars On Exit Polls: Skepticism -- because they're wrong.

"Presidential-year level turnout," the White House is saying, as regards Republican counties.

Real Numbers... Suggest that tonight may not be all that bad.

Sodrel in Indiana was said to be a Rep to watch for. If he lost, then it was a harbinger of a big Democrat night.

He was on the endagnered list. Hostetltler was said to be toast, and pretty much a gimme pickup for Dems. (Which it looks like will prove to be the case.)

The question came with the other three endangered IN Rep's, and Sodrel was named as one to look out for.

I think he was rated as a toss-up.

The point is, he's not being clobbered, which is what would be expected if the exit polls were accurate.

At the current moment, he's tied 48-48 with 21% in. Not winning, of course, and he could still lose. But if this is a harbinger contest, the only harbinger harbinged is a very close election, where toss-ups can go either way -- and not just, as the "Big Blue Wave" requires, almost all in a Democratic direction.

Update: Hostettler Down. But, again, this was a gimme, one of those ten or so seats virtually conceded as lost.

Posted by: Ace at 04:40 PM | Comments (38)
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