If Bruce says Auburn Hills is in Ohio, it's in Ohio, and that's all there is to it.

Google Maps says it's 90 minutes, tops.

MyDD summarizes PPP on the early-vote advantage Obama has built, suggesting McCain may have already lost the election in key states. Consider Nevada:

71% of the state's likely voters say they have already cast their ballots and with those folks Obama has a much broader 57-43 lead. McCain's bringing the race to within four points is predicated on winning election day voters by a margin of 57-38.

Or Ohio:

[Obama's] banked a huge lead with early voters, who made up about 30% of the sample. He's up 65-34 with those folks. McCain's tightening the race to two points is predicated on his winning election day voters 54-44.

In other news, my prediction for tomorrow is more optimistic and unrealistic than even Kos's. I can live with that. Get your guess in before the polls close in Virginia and win an Apple MacBook Awesome No-Prize.

Voting Rights Watch: The Department of Justice decides not to honor Bush's request that it interfere in Ohio's election, while North Carolina extends early-voting hours statewide in light of historically unprecedented demand.

Another good-looking headline: 'Polls Show Obama Ahead In All Three Largest Swing States.'

Florida

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 47%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 28 LAT/Bloomberg: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 43%

Oct 27 Datamar: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 27 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 47%

Oct 27 Suffolk: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 27 Zogby: Obama (D) 47%, McCain (R) 47%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): McCain (R) 48%, Obama (D) 46%


Ohio

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 42%

Oct 28 LAT/Bloomberg: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 28 SurveyUSA: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 27 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 27 Zogby: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 45%

Oct 26 Univ. of Akron: Obama (D) 45%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 25 Univ. of Cincinnati: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 46%

Oct 24 PPP (D): Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 44%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): McCain (R) 48%, Obama (D) 45%


Pennsylvania

Oct 29 Quinnipiac: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 28 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 46%

Oct 28 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 27 Temple Univ.: Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 27 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 26 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 53%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 25 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 52%, McCain (R) 41%

Oct 24 Muhlenberg Tracker: Obama (D) 52%, McCain (R) 40%

Oct 24 Str. Vision (R): Obama (D) 50%, McCain (R) 43%

As warned, it's a busy kind of week. Here's what I'm reading about:

* Obama returns again to North Carolina tomorrow morning in Raleigh.

* The N&O looks at North Carolina's answer to the butterfly ballot, the straight ticket vote that doesn't vote straight ticket. This is a very foolish way to design a ballot, but it has a long history in North Carolina, and it's fairly well-marked both on the ballot and in the polling place. I'm hopeful this won't be determinative of the outcome here.

* Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

* A PEW Research poll puts Obama up an improbable sixteen points nationally, up 19 among those who have already voted. The RNC has taken to the airwaves in a bid to retain Montana. In Ohio, 22% of the population has already voted, favoring Obama 56%-39%. McCain is only up three points in Arizona. In short, things are looking good.

* Another article looks back to Howard Dean as one of the forces (both before and after "The Scream") who made Barack Obama's candidacy (and, one hopes, landslide victory) possible.

* And another classic for the Palin files: forget "diva," a top McCain adviser says Palin is a "whack job." More at Washington Monthly, which makes the key point: "To blame Palin is to blame McCain. If the campaign is her fault, then the campaign is his fault."

The Quinnipiac and Big 10 Battleground polls have terrible news for McCaniacs. We can't really be this far ahead, can we? Via Daily Kos.

The highlights:

Florida (Quinnipiac)
Obama 49
McCain 44

Indiana (Big 10)
Obama 51
McCain 41

Ohio (Big 10)
Obama 53
McCain 41

Ohio (Quinnippiac):
Obama 52
McCain 38

Pennsylvania (Big 10)
Obama 52
McCain 41

Pennsylvania (Quinnippiac)
Obama 53
McCain 40

Cleveland's Plain-Dealer, which endorsed Bush (!) in 2000 and chose not to endorse anyone in 2004, endorses Barack Obama.

Kerry took 67% of the vote in Cuyahoga County in 2004, hoping to win the state on the back of Cleveland's comparatively huge population; unfortunately, putting aside questions of election malfeasance and voter suppression for the moment, the margin was such that Kerry would have needed upwards of 80% of Cuyahoga's vote to offset his losses elsewhere in the state.

The battle in Ohio this year will be about turnout, not newspaper endorsements, but every bit helps.

Matt Y. gives us a taste of when we'll know Obama's won this thing.

Virginia and Indiana close at 7PM Eastern, Ohio closes at 7:30PM Eastern (the portions of Indiana in Eastern Time actually close at 6PM) and then Florida closes at 8PM Eastern with the vast majority of the state (the non-panhandle part) closing at 7PM Eastern. In practice, McCain needs to win all four of those states to have a shot at the election, and he’s currently behind in three of them. It’d still take a while before anyone concedes anything, and political junkies will want to see Senate outcomes in Alaska and Oregon, but it’s very possible that the country will basically know the outcome of the presidential election pretty early.

In the worst case scenario that McCain does manage to win all four—and North Carolina, and Missouri, and Georgia and West Virginia, and all the other states that currently look to be in play—it'll then come down to Colorado, where the polls close at 9 PM EST. If Obama wins there and in New Mexico, he still wins, even if he loses everywhere else.

RCP has a six-point Obama advantage in Colorado.

The Supreme Court has issued an injunction against the GOP's successful voter-suppression lawsuit in Ohio.

In a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the court did not decide whether Brunner was violating federal law by not providing the information, as the Ohio Republican Party contended in its lawsuit.

Rather, the court said it was unlikely that as a private entity, the GOP had the legal authority to sue Brunner on the issue or that the lower court had the power to issue its order in this case.

Even Joe the Plumber was at risk of getting his vote suppressed by these shenanigans. Let's hope that's the end of this tactic for '08.

The debate begins in just a few minutes, but there's time to appreciate some good early voting news: 'Obama Dominating Among Early Voters in Five Swing States.'

There's also time to worry a bit about some bad early voting news: Republicans in Ohio have won a court case requiring Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to create computer programs to cross check all new voter registrations so that county boards of elections can doublecheck new registrants. Voter suppression there just got a whole lot easier.

It may not matter: no matter what McCain says or does, it looks like people are voting for Obama anyway.

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

Politics links.

* The NSA has been shamelessly spying on people they knew had nothing to do with terrorism. More at Washington Monthly. Why is nobody in jail over this?

* Matt has a flashback back to 2004 to argue that thinking we would win back them is nothing like thinking we're going to win now.

* Will a reverse Bradley effect benefit Obama? Maybe, but it's certain that corrupt voter-roll tampering will once again help the Republicans. Why is nobody in jail over this?

* You can only steal a close election. West Virginia is a tossup?

* The GOP is grumbling in Nevada and Virginia.

* Can the Dems hit 60 in the Senate? Ezra Klein look at the possibilities, while Matt Yglesias says 59 isn't really all that different from 61. (Maybe, but I'd still like 61.)

* What are the candidates transition teams like? Did you just say one of them doesn't have one?

* Obama gives his most direct statement on Ayers yet.

Obama "had assumed" from Bill Ayers' stature in Chicago, he told the Philadelphia-based Michael Smerconish, that Ayers had been "rehabilitated" since his 1960s crimes.

In the interview, which was taped this afternoon and will air tomorrow, and which you can listen to above, Obama recalled moving back to Chicago after law school, and becoming involved in civic life there.

"The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois," he said. "That's how i met him -- working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan's" along with "a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders."

"Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated," Obama said.

* And George Packer, touring rural Ohio in the lead-up to the election, writes up his experiences there in the New Yorker.

Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the average age in Bonnie’s. “I’m self-employed,” he said. “I can’t afford to be a Democrat.” Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain’s post-Convention “bounce” and Sarah Palin’s “executive experience.” At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”

A maintenance man at the nearby high school, who declined to give his name, said that he had been undecided until McCain selected Palin to be his running mate, which swung his support to Obama.

“So you’re a sexist more than a racist,” Herbert joked.

“I just think the guy Obama picked would do better if he got assassinated than McCain’s if he died of frickin’ old age in office,” the maintenance man said.

Four women of retirement age were sitting at the next table. All of them spoke warmly of Palin. “She’d fit right in with us,” Greta Jennice said. “We should invite her over.” None had a good word to say about Obama. “I think he’s a radical,” a white-haired woman who wouldn’t give her name said. “The church he went to, the people he associated with. You don’t see the media digging into that.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.

“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added.

“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,” Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. When I asked if Obama’s health-care plan wouldn’t be a good thing for people in Glouster, she said, “I’ll believe it when I see it. If it’s actually happening, I’d say that’s good.” But she and the others had far more complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about the health-insurance industry and corporations. Dunham declared her intention to write in a vote for either Snoopy or T. Boone Pickens. “I’m not going to vote for a Republican—they’ve had their chance for the last eight years and they’ve screwed it up,” she said. “But I really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”

I asked where she had learned that.

“On the Internet.”

Morning politics.

* Landslide ascendant? New polls from Quinnipiac show Obama breaking away in Florida (51-43), Ohio (50-42) and Pennsylvania (54-39). Lots of reasons for this; in addition to the economic crisis that Ben Smith highlights, there's also McCain's increasingly erratic behavior and the snowballing unpopularity of Sarah Palin. Nate Silver of 538.com was on Countdown last night trumpeting a predicted 330-207 Electoral College blowout—an opinion Dick Morris of all people would call conservative—and OpenLeft has a great chart from the Princeton Election Meta-Analysis showing the distribution of all possible outcomes.

* Which means it's time for McCain to get nasty. Again.

* Speaking of Palin, I'm reserving judgment on the debate until I actually see it. It's very hard to say how the expectations game is going to work; traditionally, the candidate perceived as unimpressive benefits from asymmetric expectations and thereby "wins," and in that sense Palin can't lose. But I'm not sure there's ever been a candidate as manifestly unprepared as Sarah Palin—and basically any mistake she makes, even relatively trivial ones, will serve to ratify the Tina-Fey caricature that has achieved critical cultural mass. In that sense she can't win. So I have no idea what's going to happen. Her recent interviews with Katie Couric have been no better than the early ones—she famously reads all newspapers but won't admit or has no idea what pro-life actually means and it's now been confirmed she couldn't discuss any court decision beyond Roe v. Wade—and the Republicans are working overtime both to prep her and to pre-spin the debate. They're now strongly attacking Gwen Ifill all over. If they're going to cry about it, fine, let's replace Ifill—is Katie Couric available?

* Explosive breaking news from Troopergate probably won't help Palin's popularity.

* What is it about being mayor of New York City that causes people to lust after emergency powers? Now Bloomberg wants an emergency third term.

* And Google endorses marriage equality.

News at noon.

* Domestic terrorism at a Dayton mosque. More at BeliefNet.

* Now McCain will (apparently) show up to vote on the bailout after all. But will he suspend his campaign beforehand?

* Is this a 'victory'? Peter Galbraith takes a sober look at Iraq in the New York Review of Books. Via MeFi.

* Nancy Gibbs in Time tries to puzzle out whether the problem is Sarah Palin's handlers or Sarah Palin herself, while Howard Kurtz says that CBS is still sitting on even more damaging footage from the interview with Katie Couric. (UPDATE: CBS says they're not. 2ND UPDATE: The footage Kurtz was referring to is actually from a different interview.)

* All this comes at a time when the McCain camp is increasingly, visibly concerned about Palin's ability to perform in the debates, even taking the highly unusual step of trying to lower expectations for her opponent.

* And the evidence continues to suggest that Obama's debate performance was better than even I thought at the time. James Fallows has received a bunch of links for this post comparing the debate to 1960, 1980, and 1992:

In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the "four more years" option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by "winning" the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief.

Steve Benen elaborates with a round-up of polling data and analysis supporting this basic claim. For high information voters, Obama may have seemed to merely draw (though I thought at the time and still think he won on the merits)—but for lower information voters expectations were significantly lower for Obama than McCain, and so Obama seemed to those viewers to be much more clearly the winner.

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Time/CNN has some good-lookin' state polls out today:

Florida: Obama 48, McCain 48
Indiana: McCain 51, Obama 45
North Carolina: McCain 48, Obama 47
Ohio: Obama 49, McCain 47
Wisconsin: Obama 50, McCain 47

I love that North Carolina number. I honestly don't expect to see it in November, but man, do I love it.

Actually existing voter fraud: following up on the Michigan outrage from earlier today, a MetaFilter thread collects vote-suppression stories from across the nation:

Wisconsin
Mississippi
Virginia

Greg Palast has more. More and more I think we need a Voting Rights Act for the 21st Century—attacking the right to vote, increasingly the national policy of the Republican party, is the deepest, darkest betrayal possible in a democracy. The games have to stop. Elections must be fair.

And good for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner for taking a stand on it.

Obama rising in my old stomping ground: Quinnipiac puts him up 49-45 in Ohio. The last poll, from before either convention, had Obama up 44-43.



McCain can't win without Ohio, even if it takes back (in order of unlikelihood) Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado. If Obama retains those three and gets Ohio, he wins even if he loses Michigan (which he won't, not even if they cheat.)



Worth saying too that these numbers and those from other recent polls feed the speculation that McCain's national numbers are rising primarily due to consolidated support in the South.

Politics bites.

* Daily Kos's BarbinMD marvels at the quick education of Sarah Palin: from not knowing the most basic facts about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday to writing an op-ed on the subject in the Wall Street Journal today.

* The first post-convention swing-state polls are coming out, and the news suggests a tight race, albeit one our side still has a slight edge in.

• In Colorado, Obama leads by a 49%-46% margin, actually an improvement for him since McCain's 49%-48% edge three weeks ago. Both results are within the margin of error.

• In Florida, the race is tied 48%-48%, compared to a 48%-46% McCain edge from about three weeks ago.

• In Ohio, McCain leads 51%-44%, compared to a 48%-43% lead for McCain from almost three weeks ago. Rasmussen has been the most favorable pollster for McCain in Ohio.

• In Pennsylvania, Obama has a slim 47%-45% edge, not significantly different from his 48%-45% lead two and a half weeks ago.

• In Virginia, McCain has a 49%-47% lead, not significantly changed from a 48%-47% McCain lead from over three weeks ago.

McCain needs both Virginia (13 EVs) and Colorado (9 EVs) to win, especially in light of the fact that he likely won't retain New Mexico (5 EVs) and Iowa (7 EVs), states Bush carried in his 286-251 victory over John Kerry in 2004. Likewise, if he loses Ohio or Florida, it's game over, and there's been a lot of speculation that the Palin pick could backfire with Jewish voters in Florida.

For Obama's part, he's really only playing defense in Michigan and (to a lesser extent) Pennsylvania, two states I would be quite surprised to see him lose.

* McCain comes out hard against Obama for... having the same position John McCain himself has held for years.

* And, via TPMtv, even Fox News's Chris Wallace has had enough of the Bridge to Nowhere lie.

Eight years after the Recount, the voting machines still don't work. Via MeFi.

I'm working on some other things, which is why liveblogging has been a bit slow. I'm not planning on waiting up until Texas is called, frankly. Events have hewed so closely to my initial predictions that I'm not sure what else there is to say. Regardless of how Texas ultimately shakes out, Clinton clearly has the credibility with her Ohio win to go forward to Pennsylvania despite the fact that from a mathematical standpoint she really can't win the nomination, and no matter what it will do to the party to have her slinging mud at Obama until April. Neither a close Obama loss or a razor-thin Obama victory in Texas changes the calculus in any significant way: If Clinton and her people are determined to go quixotically forward, they will, and the rest of us will all just have to live with it.

Despite losing Ohio 58-40 at the moment, Obama is actually ahead in delegates, 32-28. That's a pretty astounding differential, but probably closer in line to what the final results will look like—as I said below, he'll lose the state, but probably not by 18.

Su, my operative in Ohio, called me just a few minutes ago to concede the state and apologize for her colossal failure in delivering Ohio for Obama. And now Hillary Clinton is the projected winner in Ohio by what looks like a good margin, though it's likely to narrow significantly when the cities start reporting. (Cleveland in particular has barely reported anything yet.) I'd guess the final margin will be under ten points, but that's just a guess.

Josh Marshall boldly tries to claim kos's "line of the night re: Huckabee" award for himself:

Can someone get Huckabee off the stage and end the most painfully embarrassing concession I think I've ever heard? I mean, put him out of my misery. Huckabee seems to have forgotten that this isn't the end of a grand, hard-fought race. It was a farce that everyone indulged because Huckabee's sort of a feel-good wingnut and had a good sense of humor. When he started on to 'Victory or Death' riff at the end I thought he might be about to end with a stunning crescendo of a ritual suicide. But apparently it was Victory or Death (or windy concession speech), the lesser known original version of the line.

John McCain comes out to "Eye of the Tiger." This is a good night for him at least insofar as it's the last night for a good while that he'll have his speeches directly up against Obama's. Meanwhile, kos reports that Obama took the under-65 demographic in all four states.

...got to give McCain credit: it's hard to believe he was able to hang in there and pull it out. A few months ago we all had him counted out entirely. I'm sure a few Imperial Republicans are happy—bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran—but the social conservatives and the natalists have got to be kicking themselves. I bet they're wishing tonight that they'd run only one Ronald Reagan wannabe as opposed to five or six.

No credit for this speech, though. Dull, dull, dull.

As expected, Rhode Island is called for Clinton, though the margin is quite a bit closer than I expected it would be pretty much exactly as I predicted last night, a little less than the margin of victory in Vermont.

Actually, Huckabee dropped out just now. The real loser in all this, of course, is poor Stephen Colbert.

...kos gets in the line of night re: Huckabee. Where's Chuck Norris? Doesn't like to hang out with losers?

The networks are reporting that John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination. Huckabee to drop out tomorrow; better yet, Bush to endorse McCain tomorrow...

Still not much word on Ohio or Texas, but the results so far don't look half bad. Texas has already reported what are apparently the early voting numbers, and Obama has a lead of over 100,000. That's going to be hard for Clinton to make up.

Ohio said to be too close to call. Given where we were a few weeks ago, that's certainly good news...

Since MSNBC isn't streaming tonight, I'm forced to watch CNN. But Marc Ambinder gives me my Chuck Todd fix:

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd on MSNBC points out that Hillary Clinton's delegate spread in Ohio, assuming she wins the popular vote narrowly, could be as large as +5 or as narrow as.. -1..if Obama runs up the margins in the Cleveland-area districts held by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.

Go on, Cleveland, work your magic. Ambinder also notes that Vermont may paradoxically be the most important state of the night—it's the only state where one of the candidates is likely to gain very many delegates vis a vis the other.

MSNBC projects Vermont for Obama. No big surprise there.

HuffPo has what it describes as "first exits." I'm not sure whether that means they're the first batch of unweighted exits, which would make them almost entirely useless, or if they're just the first exit polls anyone has seen, which would make them only mostly useless. Regardless, here are the numbers:

VT Obama - 67, Clinton - 33
OH Obama - 51, Clinton - 49
TX Obama - 50, Clinton - 49
RI Obama - 49, Clinton - 49

Based on these numbers I would advise Obama fans to brace themselves for possible disappointment tonight. While Obama has consistently outperformed the last telephone polls before primaries, he has consistently underpeformed early exit data. If the exit data is biased towards Obama in the same proportions we saw last month on Super Tuesday, that would suggest he'll lose all three of the close contests by a few percent.

(On second thought, since the early voting in Texas was generally agreed to favor Obama, he may still squeak out a close win there even if this data is biased towards Obama in the way I fear it is.)

Close margins like that won't matter for the delegate math, but they do matter for the spin war, which rightly or wrongly is the important thing tonight...

While we're waiting for actual information, check out "Hillary's Math Problem" from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek, probably the most linked article of the day, which shows how Clinton can go on to win all of the remaining 16 states by huge margins—which she won't—and still not catch up to Obama's current delegate lead. This thing is already over, regardless of what happens tonight; Dean or Gore or someone needs to pull the plug.

Drudge has already called Vermont for Obama despite the fact that the polls don't close there for another half-hour. It's irresponsible and unethical but almost certainly correct.

That leaves Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas, which Drudge describes as "deadlocked." A look at the random and unreliable exit polls shows good news for either candidate depending on how information that is currently unknown shakes out. There were high numbers of independent voters in all four states, including 20% in Ohio and 25% in Texas—beating the Survey USA assumptions, which is obviously good news for Barack. Fox asked voters "which candidate could better defeat the Republican in November" and the results are also quite O-positive.

Among Ohio voters:

Obama: 52 percent
Clinton: 44

Among Texas voters:

Obama: 52 percent
Clinton: 41

However, other signs point to Clinton, including signs of high Latino turnout in Texas. Without knowing how many people voted early, and in what proportions, Texas in particular is impossible to gauge based on this data alone.