Why are  Democrats Peter Welch, Jeb Spaulding, and Tom Salmon running as Democratic/Republican?

What's up with that?  Do we have a new kind of “fusion” party candidate?  

Your thoughts?

Everything’s going to get a bit crazy in a couple hours, so I figured I’d do one more quick “news roundup” before everything goes haywire.

Two hearings set on wind project and a potential Milton wind farm is being discussed as well.

Speaking of Milton, a Milton sex offender is running for state Senate.

Remember all that talk about liberal professors allegedly converting students to their ideology?  Not so much so.

Hey, our unemployment rate is over 5%.  Go us!

John McCain, slightly lost:

per Maggie Gundersen: Bachman McCarthy Overdrive:

After the fold, I rant about one of the nearby elections.

The Reformer has a story about a former rep, Steve Darrow.  Before I say anything more about this, I will note that I am biased.  A friend of mine, Mike Mrowicki, defeated Darrow last time around and Mike is a great voice of the legislature for early childhood issues as well as pretty much anything else I believe in.  He’s also a very talented musician and an all around great guy.  

So here’s the short version: Steve at some point decided he wanted to run again, but it was too late for him to get on to the primary ballot so he decided to run as a write-in candidate.  

At the primary, he was outside my polling place, which covers more than one district, trying to talk people in to writing him in.  He stopped me on my way in and tried to talk me into voting for him.  I smiled and told him “sorry, but Mike’s a good friend of mine.”  I figured that would be the end of it.  Apparently not.  As I was trying to get in to vote, Darrow proceeded to shout that there were two slots and I could vote for him and Mike.  I was like, let it go, man.  He clearly wasn’t interested in letting it go, but I just ignored him after a short time of this.  Yelling at people you want to support you is unhelpful, and voting is something I like to do so I don’t really enjoy being harassed by local politicians in the process of doing so.  But, whatever.  

I used to like Steve, but now I think of him as basically a jerk, not just for this, but also because his write-in campaign landed him on the Republican ballot.  So he’s still running, but this time as a Republican.

In Windham County.

Yeah.  Good luck with that.

Seems a lot of the traditional media sites are downright giddy about all their widgets and Johnny-on-the-scene election goodness – and more power to ’em, as it makes doing this lowly blogging that much easier.

At GMD, we’re going to sit back and do the community thing – that is, depend on you folks out and about to give us the what for on an election open thread (which I’ll keep bumping to the top while we all doubtless generate “breaking” diaries. I hope to be posting the now-traditional Spongebob victory dance at least once). Post your updates in the results thread and I’ll try to keep the sidebar list updated, while the widgetry of MSNBC should keep us all in the know at the Presidential/National level throughout the night.

Settle in. Here we go.

UPDATE 7:30: First results on the sidebar. WCAX reports that exit polls suggest Pollina in second place by a large margin. Douglas very near 50%.

UPDATE 8:00 Results from Montpelier – Pollina takes 1st, Symington comes in 3rd behind him and Douglas.

UPDATE 8:45 Interesting Bennington numbers via vtbuzz: Douglas: 3195, Symington: 2422, Pollina: 708. Looking very likely that Douglas will break the 50% mark outright.

MY FINAL UPDATE: Okay, maybe I invited a curse by not going to an Election Eve Party for the first time in about 16 years, but I am sick as a dog with a stomach bug that hit me outta nowhere. That means there wont be many updates on the right, and analysis of the news (including what looks to be the unprecedented repudiation of the Symington campaign) is up to you all…. but I’ll have plenty to say tomorrow, including a electoral anecdotes…. have fun!)

From the Fox News website:

You can just smell the voter fraud, can’t you?

(crossposted at http://mulishbehavior.blogspot…

That’s what today is shaping up to be: a landslide.

I know, I know… don’t jinx it.

I don’t believe in jinxes.

I do believe in organization. I believe in message discipline. I believe in voter turnout. I believe in tens of thousands turning out for rallies for change. I believe in polls that underrepresent first-time voters and voters who no longer have landlines. And, I believe in the electoral college tilting inexorably in favor of Barack Obama and the states for Democrats generally.

So, put your money where your mouth is, and have a little election day fun. Predictions?

Popular vote: Obama – 54%; McCain – 46%.

Electoral college?

Obama: 352 (ME, VT, NH, NY, MA, RI, DE, CT, MD, NJ, DC, PA, MI, OH, VA, IL, FL, WI, IA, MN, MT, CO, NM, NV, CA, OR, WA, HI).

McCain: 186 (AK, ID, UT, WY, SD, ND, AZ, NE, MO, KS, OK, TX, AR, LA, MS, AL, GA, NC, TN, KY, WV, SC, IN).

Dems end up with 58 seats in the Senate (gain of 9 seats); 259 seats in the House (gain of 26 seats).

Oh, and one last prediction: The first state called for Obama after the polls close? Vermont… at 7:04 p.m. EST.

You heard it here first. Somebody will be eating crow on Wednesday (hopefully not me).

See how your predictions stack up against the pros and pundits at the Washington Post. Just click here and you can check out all their numbers on the key races tonight. Interestingly my prediction on the electoral college math matches up most closely with Ed Rollins (big GOP advisor) and Eleanor Clift (liberal-lefty from Newsweek and McLaughlin Group). My Senate/House picks coincided with Juan Williams of NPR and Bill Maher of whatever it is he does (HBO? Smarminess?). Hmmm. What does it all mean?!

My Grandmother, who was born in 1892, was a suffergette, meaning that she practiced suffrage — marching and protesting for the right and privilege of women to vote.

A friend of mine, in her 70's sent me this photo yesterday.  I admire this friend a great deal.  She is using her elder years to walk all over the world for peace and the end of nuclear weapons. 

Yesterday when my friend sent me this photo, I immediately thought of my Grandmother.  Grandma was one of a kind.  She was an artist who painted until two weeks before her death at 97-years-old.  She went to art school, had a career, and worked to pick up the financial ruin of the depression.  Her parents immigrated to the US.  She was a shining example to all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Today when I vote for Obama, I will remember my grandmother.

Please note the tag “President Obama” attached to this post.

With  polls closing in 60 seconds in  —

Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), Washington DC, (3), Illinois (21), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), Michigan (18) New Hampshire (4), New Jersey (15), Pennsylvania (21), Missouri (11) Mississippi (6), South Dakota (3), Alabama (9), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Oklahoma (7)

—  and based on GMD's extensive network of national on-the-ground poll data, ** cough, cough ** we (OK I am) pleased to announce that Barack Obama is President-elect of the United States of America.

I confess to having a great, you might say sentimental, devotion to voting. I have voted in every election I've been eligible for, and that means I've voted for a long succession of losing presidential candidates. In fact, Clinton was the first winning candidate I ever voted for, and one of the votes I was least enthusiastic for.

Still, I love to vote. This year I'm more fervent about it than in most years, and the last few nights I've felt like a little kid before Christmas. It's not just me, though. I sense a greater excitement for this election than I ever have before.

I was in Boston the night Obama secured enough electoral votes to be the candidate. I was watching his speech in the basement of a building at Boston University with four or five maintenance workers, four of whom were African, one was Hispanic. These guys were totally into it. They knew the candidates, they knew their positions, they could talk knowledgeably about possible vice presidential and cabinet choices. They knew it was an important night.

But not as important as tomorrow.

When Barack Obama was born, black people were still legally prevented from voting in parts of the United States.  During our lifetimes we've seen brave people beaten and killed trying to vote; and seen candidates elected not because of the strength of their policies, but because of their ability to exploit racial fears and hatred. Now, our country, a country that owes so much of its culture to the legacy of slavery, stands on the threshold of electing its first black president. Think of what that says to the rest of the world, but more importantly, think of what it says to millions of our own citizens, citizens who have been told their whole lives, in word and in deed, that they don't have a say in what happens to their country. 

He'll make mistakes, and we'll presumably stay in the opposition to much of what he does. But the important thing is this:

Starting tomorrow, everything is different. Forever.

Yes, I’ve seen the polls. Lord god have I seen the polls. Yes, I’ve heard the reports of lopsided early voting. Yes I understand the whole underpolling-the-cell-phone-users bit. But the fact is, I’m still scared half out of my brain.

Part of it is that I’ve seen so many elections go the way they weren’t supposed to – sometimes despite the polls (2002 Vermont Governor’s race anybody?). And despite all the cavalier talk of “blowouts,” even an electoral vote “blowout” will, when all is said and done, be close in terms of the popular vote. Too close for comfort.

But the thing that really has me scared is the stakes. It’s always about the stakes. I can go downtown and challenge some pool-playing hot shot to a game for a drink, and who cares? It’s just a lousy drink.

But this election feels more like a game of russian roulette. Sure, the odds are 5 in 6 that I’ll come out okay – but the stakes are withering. And consider the stakes for this election.

A McCain win would mean another war of choice with Iran. A McCain win would mean throwing economic gasoline onto our global financial firestorm, just for the sake of letting the super-rich squeeze out every last drop of money they can from a middle and working class on the brink. A McCain campaign would mean throwing environmental degradation into high gear.

But a McCain campaign would also give us a president who would be likely to become incapacitated at some point in his term, which would then bring us another president who would waste no time using the power of the office to force her frightening religious beliefs into every corner of our Republic, and whose zeal for a culture war against me and my family would only be matched by her abject incompetence at steering the ship of state through uniquely troubled waters.

So while I objectively understand where the early champagne-poppers are coming from, witnessing such premature celebrations just scares me even more. It aint over til its over, and I can’t help but feel that pretending it’s all a done deal – even if it may well be – is to not truly appreciate the totality of what’s at stake.

So tomorrow I’ll venture out into the barrel of the gun, and do my part to tip the odds our way as the trigger is pulled. And if enough of us do, hopefully when that hammer falls as the polls close, it’ll fall onto an empty chamber.

After all – the odds are on our side, right?