Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The Election

I am a precinct vice chair in the 4th Congressional District of Maryland. By 3:00pm roughly half the registered voters of the precinct had already voted, and people estimated that 70 to 80 percent may turn out by the end of the day. That is great! The attitudes seem to be very good. A number of people asked me for souvenirs because they thought this would be a historical landmark of an election. One lady told me she had come back from Georgia to vote because she thought she wanted to be part of the historic day.

Check out Nate Silver's great website on the election -- www.fivethirtyeight.com. The following graph from his simulation indicates that Obama is an odds on favorite, and is likely to obtain more than 300 electoral votes (270 suffice to take the election).

1 comment:

John Daly said...

Do any of the pollsters track the impact of social networking on the election. Facebook had more than a million and a half people set their facebook status to get out the vote, and almost one million of them had their status updated automatically to support that effort.

Three and a quarter million people have already recorded the fact that they voted. This was all done on the day before the election and election day.

I think the vast majority of these postings were for Obama.