Midday links while I wonder whether tonight's elections will go long or short.

* Open Left wisely points out that today's elections don't really tell us anything about national politics while Kos's Jed Lawson pre-spin takes a different tack in arguing that Owens wins even if he loses. Steve Benen points out that a district in California that is essentially a mirror image of NY-23—historically very Democratic, though significantly less one-sided than NY-23's century-and-a-half Republican streak—is having a special election tonight that doesn't count (UPDATE: Think Progress, too), while TPM debunks in advance the bogus assertions of electoral fraud already erupting anywhere Republicans could lose tonight.

* Virginia is never enough: McDonnell 2012? Really? Even Sarah Palin managed to serve a few months before seeking national office.

* Reid too is saying there's no deal with Lieberman. Maybe not anymore.

* Why do humans kiss? To spread our germs.

* A brief history of innoculation.

* And MetaFilter wishes happy birthday to Sputnik and the Blob while saying goodbye to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Laika the dog.

Off-Year Election Predictions! The three elections tomorrow that will dominate spin in the press about whether America loves or hates Barack Obama are, of course, VA-GOV, NJ-GOV, and NY-23.

VA-GOV: It seems pretty over for Deeds, and pro-Democrat spinners will be well-advised to focus their attention elsewhere. "You know, Virginia's still in the South" and "Virginia always votes against the White House" are the best Democrats have here, with a big helping of "And Deeds ran a lousy campaign, largely against Obama" for flavor.

NJ-GOV: The polls are close, with the most recent showing a slight edge to Chris Christie, but I really think between Daggett and a superior get-out-the-vote operation Corzine will manage to eke out the win here.

So (if I'm right) that's 1-1, and it all comes down to NY-23. This is a crazy three-way race, with the Republican, Dede Scozzafava, suddenly pulling out over the weekend (though she'll remain on the ballot) and then, even more surprisingly, tossing a strong endorsement behind the Democrat, Bill Owens. The Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, has the support of national popular-in-Republican-circles like Sarah Palin behind him, but doesn't actually live in the district or know all that much about it, and will likely be hurt by straight-ticket Republican voting by people who may not have even heard Scozzafava's dropped out.

I won't presume to insult Nate Silver by calling the race when he called it a coin-flip, but I will note that either way the results of this very unusual House race in a small district in upstate New York will likely determine who "wins" the spin war in the national press and thereby determine the tenor of electoral coverage going into 2010—which is as good an indictment of contemporary journalism as any I think you'll see this week.

It will be very interesting, win or lose in NY-23, to see what lessons the GOP takes from the Hoffman ascendancy as we go into 2010 and 2012, and, indeed, what effect running hard to the right will have on their chances if that's how they decide to go. The conventional view is that running away from the center hurts a party's electoral prospects, but I'm not at all convinced the American electorate is quite so rational in its decision-making. It could just be that the pendulum swings back and forth between whatever two parties happen to exist at the moment, regardless of the content of their positions. As I wrote back in May:

More and more I think there's only two possibilities: Either the GOP is in fact in a death spiral and will actually disappear as a national party within the next decade, or the GOP has realized that in a two-party system you don't actually need to say you're sorry; you can just sit back and wait for your opponents to have bad luck, then go crazy once you're back in office. After that incumbency will protect you for a good, long while, and even to the extent it doesn't you can accomplish long-term goals in a very short timespan with party unity, weak opposition, and a compliant, mendacious press.

Jury's still out. NY-23 will be an interesting first data point.

Saturday!

* Early ratings for the Dollhouse premiere are not exactly promising. (What genius thought Brothers would be a good lead-in?) AICN points out that Friday ratings were down across the board, and it's not down much from last year's finale—but it certainly doesn't reflect hoped-for DVD buzz, either. The episode itself was pretty well put-together, though writing Amy Acker out due to her unavailability kills possibly the single best thing about the show. (No advancement on the 2019 thread, either, though apparently a sequence with Felicia Day was filmed and cut.) Let's hope Happy Town fails quick.

* Also re: Dollhouse: Alyssa Rosenberg interviews Joss.

Whedon: The world will expand. Oh holy boy will the world expand. And then, unless our ratings tick up a bit, it will very suddenly contract.

* All 156 Twilight Zone episodes in 9 minutes and 59 seconds. More TZ links at MetaFilter surrounding the Rod Serling Conference in Binghamton, which I wish I could have gone to.

* Polling the GOP landslide: the gubernatorial races in both NJ and VA have narrowed to the margin of error, while GOP polling continues to seek its bottom.

* Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

* The sad death of an uninsured twenty-three-year-old Ohio woman from H1N1 has become bound up with the fight for health care reform.

* Jackson Pollack, egomaniac.

Saturday morning linkdump 2: politics edition.

* The Vonnegut-flavored image at right is graffiti fresh from the streets of Burlington, Vermont.

* Vegetarianism, as every school child knows, is evil. I had an upstairs neighbor once who really believed this—he used to tell me all the time how vegetarians were on the fast track to full-on Nazism. Weird guy.

* Birther update: even OpinionJournal's odious "Best of the Web" column says the birthers are nuts. In the L.A. Times, Bill Maher says birtherism is no joke. But you and I know birtherism exists only in the feverish lies of Chris Matthews and Markos Moulitsas.

* Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post on corporate interference at MSNBC and Fox News.

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp...

* Democrats facing big off-year electoral losses in New Jersey and Virginia?

* In the days leading up to Obama's decision to run, Axelrod prepared a private strategy memo -- dated Nov. 28, 2006 -- that has never been published before. He wrote that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election and argued that people almost never seek a replica -- certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush. In 2008, people were going to be looking for a replacement, someone who represented different qualities. In Axelrod's opinion, Obama's profile fit this historical moment far better than did Hillary Rodham Clinton's. If he was right, Obama could spark a political movement and prevail against sizable odds. He also counseled Obama against waiting for a future opportunity to run for president. "History is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than examples of people who ran too soon. . . . You will never be hotter than you are right now."

* A new study demonstrating that organic food is no healthier than regularly produced food seems to entirely miss the point of organics.

Raising Kaine, one of the more influencial state-level politics blogs in the country, is closing up shop. I didn't visit much, as I'm not a Virginian, but it's a big loss for progressives there. A Daily Kos diary sums up RK's career:

Lowell Feld founded Raising Kaine to promote Tim Kaine's successful 2005 campaign, and his blog was a pivotal in the progressive wave of this decade in Virginia where Democrats:

1. Kept the governorship in Democratic hands.

2. Defeated George Allen and elected Jim Webb, flipping a U.S. Senate seat.

3. Flipped Virginia's Senate majority to the Democrats.

4. Narrowed the GOP's majority in the House of Delegates to low single digits.

5. Elected Mark Warner to the U.S. Senate, flipping the other U.S. Senate seat.

6. Defeated incumbents Thelma Drake and Virgil Goode and won Tom Davis's open seat to provide Democrats with a majority of House seats.

7. Turned Virginia blue once and for all as an Obama state.

Like rain on election day: bad weather forecast for North Carolin and Virginia tomorrow. Given the well-documented enthusiasm gap and (in North Carolina) the staggering early voting numbers, my guess is that the rain benefits our side...

A little election news I didn't get to blog over the weekend.

* More on the improbable Sarah Palin prank call, including an explanation of how they did it. As with the compromising of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, the key was social engineering.

"It really took a lot of work," he said.

"We had to go through the Secret Service, the people in her entourage. It's the biggest coup so far. We're proud to add (this prank) to our top hits."

* As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib.

* There's just no way Lois Lane votes Republican.

* A Pennsylvania judge has ruled against another GOP voter suppression scheme in the state.

* But student votes are still being illegally challenged in Virginia.

* McCain is doing a campaign event in his home state, never a good sign.

* And why did McCain go on Saturday Night Live to participate in a skit mocking not him but his running mate? Things must be getting pretty fratricidal over on Team McCain.

Larry Sabato writes the McCain campaign appears to have had a "death wish" in Virginia.

Of the two shifts, by far the most significant is VIRGINIA, which we are moving from pure toss-up to LEANS OBAMA. We have been very cautious about the Old Dominion, in part because it's been our home for the better part of six decades. More than most, we know how tough this state can be for a Democratic presidential candidate. But while we continue to disbelieve the national polls showing Obama winning Virginia by 10 percentage points, we now believe that Obama has built a small edge of two or three points in the state. The reasons are clear: Bush, the disastrous economy, the demographic growth of Northern Virginia and its strong Democratic tilt, the momentum built up by recent Democratic victories (Mark Warner in 2001 and soon 2008, Tim Kaine in 2005, and Jim Webb in 2006), and the remarkable voter registration and voter contact efforts of a literal army of Obama staffers and volunteers in the state for a full year.

But it is more than that. The McCain campaign and the state GOP appear to have had a death wish. McCain's staff refused to believe Virginia was truly competitive for too long, and the McCain-Palin visits were few. McCain's brother called Northern Virginians "Commies" and one of McCain's most prominent spokespersons said they were not the "real Virginia." Generally, it is difficult to win the votes of people you are insulting.

The Virginia Republican party is also completely outclassed by the state's Democrats in money and organization. The GOP is being run by a very young, fire-breathing chairman who publicly drew an absurd link between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden--drawing angry rebukes from the top echelon of the McCain campaign as well as virtually all the senior Republican elected officials in the state. Republicans in Virginia have simply not adapted to the new moderate reality of this Mid-Atlantic state, the twelfth largest in the nation. They insist on running too far to the right, as though this were the Virginia of the Old South. It's not selling anymore.

Sabato's crystal ball also moves North Dakota to "toss-up" this week.

Pollster.com moves Virginia to Strong Obama.

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.

Landslide/hubris watch: 'Barack Obama's senior aides believe he is on course for a landslide election victory over John McCain and will comfortably exceed most current predictions in the race for the White House.'

David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, said last week that Obama had "a lot of opportunity" in states which Mr Bush won four years ago.

But in private briefings in Washington, a member of Mr Obama's inner circle of policy advisers went much further in spelling out why the campaign's working assumptions far exceed the expectations of independent observers.

"Public polling companies and the media have underestimated the scale of new Democratic voters registration in these states," the campaign official told a friend. "We're much stronger on the ground in Virginia and North Carolina than people realise. If we get out the vote this may not be close at all."

The new SurveyUSA poll puts Obama up 6 (!) in Virgnia, 51% to 45%. (Looking at the trend and the internals, I think it's fair to say that those pay equity ads should be airing nationwide.) I've been a VA booster for months because the fact is that without Virginia, McCain just can't win; taking the states which Obama seems to have locked down (the Kerry states - NH + IA + NM), he just needs nine more for a tie (which he wins) and ten for an outright victory.

So flipping either Colorado or Virginia, by themselves, is enough, provided he doesn't slip in Michigan or Pennsylvania—and right now he's ahead in all four...

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.

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.

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.

Mark Warner, still my top pick for VP, has been named the keynote speaker of the Democratic National Convention, with Ambinder reporting that the Obama team has been thinking much the same way I have about Warner as VP:

The selection of ex-VA Gov. Mark Warner to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention comes on the heels of a secret, last-minute effort to convince Warner to submit his name and record for vice presidential vetting.

Sources close to Warner say that the Virginia Senate candidate was subject to fairly intense pressure by Obama advisers to allow the team of Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy to open an account and begin their work.

Warner resisted, citing, as he has done publicly, family concerns and his public pledge to Virginians.

So unfortunately it sounds as if those efforts failed.

Meanwhile, the Field is playing "process of elimination" with the remaining likely names, daring (just for a moment) to dream Obama/Gore...

There's been a whole lot of talk the last few days about Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, with the pundits finally catching up to the renowned wisdom of my good friend Shankar D. And if the Shankaristas are right, at least I was half-right—I picked Virginia two months ago, but after cycling through Webb, Kaine, and Warner a few times I settled on Warner for pragmatic reasons. The Virginia statehouse and Webb's Senate seat are birds in the hand, while Warner's likely Senate seat is still off there in the bush. (That, and also the fact that Kaine's nominal pro-life stance makes a lot of progressive activists very nervous.)

The only question is: is this chatter a genuine leak, is it a trial balloon, or is it a courtesy because Kaine's not being picked? We'll find out soon, I guess.

There's more discussion at Raising Kaine, where the response from the commenters is surprisingly tepid.

We must be getting close to the VP announcement, right? The convention is just a little over a month away. And with Kaine and Webb both seemingly eliminated, I'm laying down my bet on Virginia's Mark Warner.

Obama's people will be opening 20 new field offices in Virginia in the next few weeks, so one way or another it looks like he thinks he can win the state. But Warner makes it a lock—and, I think, the White House too.

Where are the swing states of 2008? Salon reports. As I've mentioned once or twice before, my eye keeps being drawn to Virginia. I think Obama can win there, and if Obama wins there I don't think McCain can win at all.

Actual results liveblogging for the Chesapeake Regional. MSNBC doesn't seem do be doing a live Internet feed tonight, so I'm forced to endure the Clinton News Network feed.

10:05 pm: Like a fool, I went and stayed too long. I think that's all for me tonight. Another really good night for the Barack Nation, one that I think rewrites a lot of the narrative going into the primary's home stretch...

9:52 pm: Obama going hard after McCain. Seems like a smart move.

9:45 pm: Obama floats a few new buzzwords: Obamacan, New American Majority...

9:43 pm: "Cynics can no longer say our hope is false..." I've been saying for a while now that Hillary is going to regret saying "false hopes" and "reality check" more than anything else she may regret this primary season.

9:38 pm: Obama on.

9:31 pm: CNN calls Maryland for Obama immediately, as expected.

9:29 pm: As best I can tell, Clinton's sole argument for her candidacy is this universal health care misrepresentation.

...oh wait, she's got something else. She wants to stop the foreclosure of people's homes. Obama, of course, delights in foreclosures from the inner sanctum of his giant money bin.

9:12 pm: Clinton says Obama is all hat and no cattle. Fighting words!

Meanwhile, Obama has taken the delegate lead (including superdelegates) even at CNN, which up to now has tried to rig their delegate count for Clinton in just about every way possible.

9:10 pm: I'm told that that Chesterfield County is now fixed. Hillary's talking now.

8:59 pm: They're playing Hillary's entrance music now. Clap clap, point point.

8:58 pm: Carville on CNN reflects the conventional wisdom; Clinton has to win all three of OH, TX, and PA to be the nominee. I'm not convinced she's the nominee even if she wins all three—at this point it depends on the margins, and I'm not sure she can win them by enough, if she can win them all.

8:55 pm: A reader mails into Michael Crowley about the "ultimate Hillary disaster scenario":

Could it be that downscale voters are also "low-information" voters when compared with their Volvo-driving broadband-surfing upscale brethren? If so, it would suggest that all it was going to take was a bit of time for the word to get through that Obama is looking like a winner. Wealthier voters may be the leading edge of a wave. Downscale voters may be the ones who catch trends later--and then really give them mass market power. If so, it's bad news for Senator Clinton going into Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This seems plausible to me, and I think it's reflected in Al Giordano's crunching of the exits.

8:45 pm: More interesting numbers: "As of 8:29, with 66% reporting, 465,364 Dem ballot choices vs, 223,601 Rep." That bodes very well for November. With the right candidate, Virginia could flip.

8:36 pm: Clinton coming on in El Paso in a few minutes. It's on C-SPAN2; probably will be on other channels too.

8:35 pm: Virginia called for McCain. But Huck will rise again.

8:31 pm: Polling the later states: Obama starting to run away with North Carolina, too...

8:25 pm: MSNBC reports (and Ben Smith elaborates) that Mike Henry, Clinton's deputy campaign manager, has also just resigned, following Patti Solis Doyle. That's not a story they wanted in the papers tonight.

8:19 pm: Someone on CNN—didn't catch the name—says that ideally the voters should decide the result, but "if it's not clear-cut, the superdelegates may have to step in to decide things." But this is precisely ass-backwards—the only reason the voter's decision can't be clear cut is because of the existence of 700+ superdelegates, which places a total delegate majority out of reach in anything but a blowout.

If there were no superdelegates, Obama would more or less have the nomination sewn up after tonight.

CNN's been hitting this superdelegate issue over and over tonight, by the way. The Clinton people must think it's their only chance.

8:15 pm: Looking through the county-by-county results, Jaimee notices something strange: with 96.92% of the precincts reporting, Barack has 12,280 votes in Chesterfield County; Bill Richardson has 11, Hillary has zero. I'm an Obama fan, but that can't be right, can it? We need electoral reform in this country, very very badly.

8:10 pm: Barack holding onto his 30-point lead in Virgnia, with 45% in, while McCain is holding onto his slim 3% lead thus far.

8:02 pm: Shock! Obama wins D.C.

7:56 pm: A friend writes in with news from the ground in Virginia:

So I just talked to my mother, the yellow-dog Republican (wait--can someone be a yellow-dog Republican? Or is there some other colorful animal for Republicans?), who says she voted today for Obama (as did "everyone [she works] with") because she figured McCain would definitely win, and she wanted to put in a protest vote against Hillary.

It's a twisted process, but I have to say, I like the product.

7:50 pm: Via Shankar, Ben Smith has more numbers: Obama wins Latinos, 55-45, I think for the first time. The CNN exits have even worse news for Clinton: the same percentage say Obama is "most qualified to be Commander-in-Chief."

7:45 pm: My dad writes in to say they're keeping the polls in Maryland open 90 more minutes. I've heard reports of high traffic on the Beltway, so this is probably why—though my experience of Beltway gridlock suggests that 90 minutes won't nearly be enough. (CNN confirms: traffic problems caused by the bad weather.)

7:45 pm: With 23% in, Obama is leading 61-38, while McCain and Huckabee keep flipflopping. Ben Smith has some more interesting number-crunching at the Politco—Clinton winning Western V.A., Obama taking everything else.

He won white men, with 55 percent. He won religious Catholics, with 54 percent. He got 46 percent of the vote of white Catholics, a group with which some have theorized he's weak. He won every income category, though his support skews toward the higher brackets. He won women and men.

Clinton's base of support was white Democrats, who gave her 59 percent of their vote. She also won among whites older than 45, losing younger white voters. But Obama's strong performance with independent voters made the white vote very close — he got 48 percent to her 51 percent.

Meanwhile, he won 90 percent, the most yet, of the support of black voters.

7:34 pm: CNN reports that Obama won late deciders, but not very late deciders—people who decided in the last 24 hours flipped back to Hillary. I think this is a result we've seen elsewhere; very late deciders seem to go with the safe bet, the name they know.

7:25 pm: CNN's viewers aren't buying their attempt to spin the superdelegate issue—the emails they're reading on CNN.com are pretty angry about this.

7:20 pm: Noam Scheiber says "Virginia may almost be a mirror image of New Hampshire: Independents, assuming McCain had the state in the bag, may have decided to participate in what they (mistakenly) believed would be a closer race on the other side." Makes sense. This is as good a time as any to push my New Hampshire revisionism, namely that the narrow loss in New Hampshire may have saved the Obama campaign by preventing her from the more incompetent members of her staff (*cough* Mark Penn *cough*) as she'd been rumored to be planning. If she'd been able to bring Carville in a month ago, I suspect she'd be doing a whole lot better now.

7:14 pm: Wolf really laying into Kerry on CNN.com Live, basically asking him over and over to promise to vote for Hillary in his capacity as a super "automatic" delegate. Finally Kerry just has to laugh at him.

7:08 pm: Read in the DKos comment thread that "Obama getting the biggest support from whites in any state to date." That fits with the Fox exits I linked to below; only a 3% difference separating the two in the white vote.

7:01 pm: Fox and CNN both call Virginia for Obama, "twenty-three seconds after the polls close." Virginia was the only state of the three that people thought Clinton might surprise in, so that's good news. Of course it's the margin of victory that really matters here—we need to wait to see how many delegates he's actually going to snag here.

6:57 pm: CNN teasing results "at the top of the hour." I like the sound of that.

6:54 pm: Fox's exit poll demographics are incredible. Obama winning young voters 80-20; winning women; winning seniors...