All Blog Posts from Horserace

Though votes are still being counted out west – and there are provisional and absentee ballots outstanding – CBS News is estimating that the final turnout in the 2008 election will be 133 million or more Americans, many of whom endured hours-long waits Tuesday to cast their ballots.

133 million votes would mean that 57 percent of the voting age population cast a ballot, CBS News estimates, up from 55 percent in 2004 and 50 percent in 2000.

The percentage turnout in this election is unlikely to be the highest in American history – as the Associated Press notes, the turnout rate in 1960's presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was 63.8 percent.

In response to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP last week, a federal judge in Virginia has ruled that the state will not be forced to schedule longer voting hours and reallocate some voting machines to black precincts.

In the lawsuit, the NAACP said the state was not prepared for tomorrow's election, where record turnout is expected. It argued that there were not enough voting machines for areas that predominately serve African-American voters, and asked governor Tim Kaine to extend voting hours from 7pm to 10pm.

As CBS 6 reports, the ruling from the judge today means that hours will remain the same and that voting machines will not be moved.

The Virginia State Board of Elections released a statement that it was pleased with the decision.

"The SBE wants to remind voters that the polls open at 6:00 a.m. and close at 7:00 p.m.," they said. "At 6:45 p.m. it will be announced that the polls are about to close. Any voter who is in line to vote by 7:00 p.m. will still be able to cast their vote."

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Senior advisers for John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee briefed reporters on the state of the race earlier today, with campaign manager Rick Davis proclaiming his candidate in the midst of “one of the greatest comebacks that you've seen since John McCain won the primary.”

Political director Mike DuHaime laid out the campaign’s efforts in targeting voters over the past several days, saying that the joint effort with the RNC has given the campaign a “data and technology edge” that has allowed for intense micro-targeting and voter identification. DuHaime said the effort has far outpaced that of the Bush campaign in 2004. “In the past week, past seven days, we've made over 5.3 million targeted calls and door knocks,” he said according to a transcript of the call released by the campaign. “These are the people we believe are either going to vote for McCain and need the push to get out or are people who are persuadable voters that we think are still sitting on the fence that we need to personally touch. We did 1.3 million phone calls and door knocks yesterday alone.”

Davis also predicted that the McCain campaign will have outspent Barack Obama’s in TV advertising over the last ten days of the campaign when all is said and done and insisted that many voters remain in the class of late-breakers. And, on the subject of running mate Sarah Palin, Davis launched a strong defense. “Governor Palin's crowds are huge,” he said, noting that her event last night drew 20,000 people while Joe Biden drew just 800 in the same vicinity. “So, all the talk that we see on television and the newspapers about what a drag Governor Palin is on our ticket can't be further from the truth. She's electrifying crowds all across the battleground states, and we really appreciate the hard work she's putting in.”

A 13-point national lead for Barack Obama could translate into an Electoral College landslide, according to the latest models from CBS News and YouGov/Polimetrix.

The most recent CBS News/New York Times poll had Obama leading among likely voters nationally 52 percent to 39 percent, and the previous CBS News poll showed a similar lead. Guided by the results of the two polls, YouGov/Polimetrix then modeled 50 state electorates for CBS News, incorporating information from 26,671 online interviews with registered voters.

YouGov/Polimetrix applied the CBS News/New York Times double digit-lead to their 50-state national results weighted to each state’s relative vote size, demographics, and matched to the CBS News/New York Times Poll in national party identification and ideology.

The technique allows the CBS News elections and survey unit and YouGov/Polimetrix to to estimate the probability that each candidate would carry any given state -- as of now -- in a national race. In late September, the national poll’s 5-point lead for the Democrats translated in the CBS News/YouGov model into a most likely outcome of 313 Electoral Votes for Obama and 225 Electoral Votes for McCain,. In the current modeling, the most likely outcome produced by a double-digit Obama lead could be an Electoral College landslide, Obama 390 Electoral Votes, McCain 148.

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A dispatch from CBS News pollster Anthony Salvanto...

Early and absentee voting is under way in lot of states – including, now, in the battleground of Ohio – and the Obama campaign is pressing hard for voters to take advantage of it.

That may not be just they’re looking to boost turnout.

Because Obama fared poorly with late-deciding voters in many primaries, early voting could make or break his fortunes. Granted, this will be a different electorate, but if those primary trends hold, Obama would want to build vote margins now.

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UWIRE, the leading aggregator of student-generated content, has launched a campaign-focused blog in partnership with CBSNews.com and the washingtonpost.com. YouthVote ’08 will be written and maintained by college-aged journalists, bringing the perspective and reaction of young voters to campaign events through Election Day.

The blog will provide best-of political coverage from UWIRE, including original reporting and commentary from over 50 young correspondents ranging from video, columnists, editorial cartoonists, photographers and reporters. "There are a tremendous number of first-time voters who will be crucial in this election and YouthVote ‘08 will provide direct insight into the issues they are facing along with their mindset," said Ben French, VP and General Manager of UWIRE. Stay tuned into those all-important young voters with YouthVote ‘08.

Just ahead of tomorrow's meeting of the Democratic National Committee's rules committee to decide how to count the delegates from Florida and Michigan – states that were punished by the DNC for moving their primaries forward on the calendar – a group headed by Hillary Clinton donors has begin running an ad calling for the full delegations from both states to be seated.

The New York Times reports that the group, Count The Votes Cast, formed a political action committee this week. Their 30-second spot, running in Washington, D.C. and on CNN, shows five founding members of the group talking straight into the camera.

“We are Democrats," they say in the spot. "We care about what happens in November. We urge the Democratic National Committee to seat all of the delegates from Florida and Michigan. There’s no question about the validity of votes, it’s whether they’ll count. After 2000, how can any Democrat support votes not being counted? Count all the votes. Not to do so will fracture the party and bring disaster in November.”

Watch it:

The protracted Democratic primary battle may be taking its toll on the candidates, but it certainly doesn't seem to be dampening the enthusiasm of Democratic primary voters.

The Associated Press is reporting that almost "90,000 people have cast ballots for next week's Indiana primary, far outpacing the total number of absentee votes during the last presidential primary in 2004." (Four years ago, 57,000 people cast absentee votes.) The state doesn't measure in which primary these early votes have been cast, but with the GOP nomination settled, it's likely that the surge in early ballots is the result of the Democratic battle.

In North Carolina, meanwhile – another state with an imminent primary – more than 100,000 ballots have already been cast, according to the News & Observer. The vast majority of those votes have been cast in "one stop early voting," which began April 17th.

Turnout was far higher on the Democratic side than the Republican even before the GOP race was decided. "From January 3, the day of the Iowa caucuses, to February 5, i.e. Super Tuesday, when more than 20 states held nominating contests, more than 19.1 million Americans cast a ballot in a Democratic primary (or caucused as a Democrat), compared with just 13.1 million on the Republican side," according to US News.

One question on political watchers' minds today: Has today's likely record voter turnout in Pennsylvania been coupled with voting irregularities?

The answer, at this point, seems to be yes – but the problems that have arisen have been relatively insignificant, according to the Pennsylvania State Department. A spokesman told NBC/NJ that "It's just been minor, normal kinds of stuff. Nothing major, nothing widespread."

But reports of problems have been coming in. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that more than 100 complaints have been lodged so far today, often concerning malfunctioning machines. The newspaper reported one claim that malfunctioning machines meant a two-hour wait for voters at one polling place.

At another polling place, the wrong voting machine was delivered – potentially disenfranchising voters. Liberal Web site Daily Kos says that "new voters were sent cards in the mail with the wrong polling place."

Overall, however, things have gone relatively smoothly, according to Zack Stalberg, president and CEO of the election watchdog group the Committee of Seventy.

"There have been scattered reports of problems but it sounds like they're being dealt with pretty quickly," Stalberg told the Inquirer. "Frankly we've seen a lot more problems with machine malfunctions than we're seeing today."

Despite a day's worth of back-and-forth among almost all the parties involved, it appears increasingly likely that plans for a re-vote in Michigan will go the way of those in Florida – down the tubes. Here's a rundown of today's action.

Hillary Clinton rearranged her schedule to make a quick trip to the state this morning where she tried to put some pressure on Barack Obama to publicly support the re-vote plan that continues to languish in the state legislature, held up by many of his supporters. "Senator Obama speaks passionately on the campaign trail about empowering the American people," Clinton told an audience in Detroit this morning. "I'm here today to encourage him to match those words with actions."

Obama's campaign released a statement from campaign attorney Robert Bauer in which he outlined some potential legal problems with the plan, including that voters who participated in the GOP primary in January would be barred and raised the possibility of extensive post-vote litigation: "Whether the state can achieve its goals here depends on the nature and seriousness of the legal and administrative questions presented by this initiative — questions that, raised after the election, could put at risk the running of the election, undermine acceptance of the results if the election is held, and in both cases effectively deny Michigan voters, a second consecutive time, meaningful participation in the nominating process."

The Clinton campaign then issued a statement refuting those concerns: "The bottom line is that Michigan has all the problems and promise that we talk about in this country. Competing in Michigan sends a signal that Democrats care and understand the people there deserve the chance to make their voices heard and need someone in the White House who will hear their voices. If Barack Obama doesn’t want to help make that happen, Hillary Clinton is ready to do so. We call on the Obama campaign to let the people of Michigan vote."

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