The Times looks backwards in While McCain Looked Away, Florida Shifted, and says ground game and advertising blitz are making the difference.
The Herald has a snapshot of early voting Democrats have the edge so far in early voting:
Early data show Democrats lining up more frequently for early voting than Republicans, balancing out the GOP's absentee-ballot advantage.
Meanwhile, long lines continue at the polls.
Latest data: More Democrats voting early than in 2004; more Democrats voting than Republicans — except in Florida.
Florida – 2008 to date
|
All Voting |
||
|
Dem |
650,363 |
43% |
|
Repub |
651,700 |
43% |
|
Other |
225,980 |
14% |
|
|
||
Ben Smith has some really cool early voting stories:
Get your hankie ready.
Colleagues who have voted early at the Coral Gables library report long lines, and long wait times.
The Miami-Dade Elections Department has posted a list of early voting sites with approximate wait times at each location. At this writing, the most recent data is for 2pm yesterday, and wait times varied from thirty minutes to two and half hours. I think 30 minutes might be tolerable, but to run a system that makes voters wait two and a half hours is a sign of either poor planning or an attempt to suppress the vote. Being a believer that one should rarely attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, I'm prepared to believe it's the elections dept. being its usual wonderful self, but even so….
Update — I found the following in my email:
To help students, faculty, and staff take advantage of early voting, the University will be providing free shuttle service to the Coral Gables library election site starting today. Shuttles from Stanford Circle on the Coral Gables campus will be running today, Thursday, October 23 and tomorrow, Friday, October 24 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; next Monday, October 27 through Friday, October 31 from 12 to 6 p.m.; and Saturday, November 1 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
If the wait times are a couple of hours, seems to me there's a danger anyone who goes out after about noon on these shuttles might get stranded, or will give up and go home. And as for voting on your lunch hour, fuggedaboutit.
Pat Buchanan says Colin Powell endorsed Obama because he's black (via Crooks and Liars).
Does this mean that Buchanan — and tens of thousands of other Irish-Americans, not to mention other hyphens — endorsed McCain because he's white?
CQ Politics | Trader Drove Up Price of McCain “Stock” in Online Market
An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor has been attempting to artificially boost the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president.
Over the past several weeks, the investor has pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into one of Intrade's predictive markets for the presidential election, the company said, resulting in great financial losses through a strategy that belies any financial motive.
Intrade is somewhat thinly traded in dollar terms, making this sort of manipulation possible. Even so, apparently it was expensive — tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs (relative to buying similar contracts on other exchanges, or even on Intrade), not to mention losses. But many news organizations look to the headline candidate matchup as a meaningful statistic, making this particular contract the one you would wish to manipulate if you were trying to send false signals to observers.
Jotwell Blenderlaw