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LIVE ELECTION NIGHT BLOG
November 04, 2008 6:21 PM
1:37 am ET: Based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain will win Alaska.
1:22 am ET: Martin Luther King III, human rights activist: “I think my dad and my mom are looking down on us with great big smiles on their faces... This was a monumental occasion for our nation tonight and perhaps even for the world because the world will look at us differently now... Quite frankly, the challenges will be insurmountable... But often where there are great challenges there are also great opportunities.”
1:20 am ET: People are spontaneously going out into the streets in Washington D.C. and across the country to celebrate Obama's victory.
12:59 am ET: Per ABC News’ Dana Hughes in Kenya: Kenyans are ecstatic about the election results and the president has even declared a national holiday tomorrow. People are singing and dancing. They really feel Obama is as much their president as that of the United States. There was skepticism all the way until the end that Obama would win, but Kenyans think that not only does this give hope to U.S. but also to Kenya.
12:50 am ET: Hundreds of Obama supporters are streaming down Pennsylvania Avenue. In downtown Washington D.C., people are dancing in the streets, waving flags and honking horns.
12:47 am ET: ABC News projects that Democrats will gain between 22 and 26 seats in the House.
12:17 am ET: "The new dawn of American leadership" was a key phrase. As Sam Donaldson said, Obama's acceptance speech was reminiscent of Kennedy's inaugural address in many ways.
12:03 am ET: "It's been a long time coming," Obama says. "Change has come to America."
Indeed it has -- a tremendous night. Whatever your political inclinations, the history here is mind-boggling. Beholding that new first family, President-Elect Barack Obama -- I mean, has there ever been a less likely path to the White House?
11:45 pm ET: John K. Wilson, Obama Biographer: "He (Obama) really has created a mandate for this election. People underestimated him many times before and have been proven wrong."
11:43 pm ET: ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports that Obama's motorcarde is en route to Grant Park now and he will speak in about 15 minutes.
11:35 pm ET: Based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects Obama will win Nevada.
11:31 pm ET: Based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain will win Arizona, his home state.
11:23 pm ET: Talk about setting a tone -- poetic words from Mark Salter.
McCain: “These are difficult times for our country, and I pledge to him to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face.”
“Whatever our differences we are fellow Americans, and please believe me when I say, no association has ever meant more to be than that.”
11:20 pm ET: This is a very gracious move by Sen. McCain -- coming out shortly after Obama went over the top.
11:18 pm ET: ABC News' Jackie Hyland: 55 percent of white voters said they voted for John McCain. 96 percent of black voters who went to the polls today said they voted for Barack Obama. 67 percent of the Hispanic vote went to Barack Obama. 80 percent of voters said candidates’ race was not a factor.
11:18 pm ET: Based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects Obama will win Florida.
11:14 pm ET: Based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects Obama will win Colorado.
11:08 pm ET: Per ABC News' Eric Horng: There were 50,000 people in Grant Park waiting for Obama to speak, and more than 30,000 nearby. But that was an hour ago and the numbers have continued to swell since then as everyone waits for Obama to speak.
11:05 pm ET: It's just now that we feel confident to project Virginia, but based on exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects Obama will win Virginia.
11:02 pm ET: We are looking at an overwhelming majority of electoral votes for Obama, even though we have yet to see results from some states, including Florida. But this is really a historic election and in many ways, not a surprise. In about an hour, we can expect to see Obama address his supporters in Grant Park.
11:01 pm ET: ABC News projects a total of 284 electoral votes for Obama and 145 for McCain.
11:00 pm ET: Based on the exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects Obama will win California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. ABC News projects he will be the 44th president of the United States.
10:47 pm ET: Rep. Tom Cole (R-Ok) said that he sees a strong Republican party after the elections. “We’ll have a little bit of soul-searching and reflection... You ought to when you lose, but I think it’s not a cause to lose... I think it’s time to hold our opponents accountable for how they govern. If they reach the middle and work with us, that will be to their advantage.. We will see a much stronger Republican showing in 2010 than we did in 2004 and 2008.”
10:40 pm ET: Based on the exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain will win South Dakota. That brings the total to 207 electoral votes for Obama and 141 for McCain.
10:35 pm ET: David Drucker, staff writer, Roll Call: “When economy is that big of an issue, the incumbent party usually loses the White House… I don’t think we can overstate the extent to which the Republican brand has been damaged by George Bush according to how voters look at it. Barack Obama has run a masterful campaign, but it’s not as though he came in a picture as 'the guy that blows everyone away.' Barack Obama exploited that damage.”
10:32 pm ET: This is the Bush legacy -- ABC News polls show that nationwide, 40 percent of people identify with the Democratic party and 32 percent with Republicans.
10:26 pm ET: Based on the exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain will win Nebraska. That brings the total projected electoral votes to 207 for Obama and 138 for McCain.
10:18 pm ET: Floyd Abrams, Constitutional Law Attorney, on what would Obama do about judges if he were to become president: “He knows this stuff. I think that he will likely -- if one can guess -- not just pick judges, I think he might pick a professor or a practicing lawyer, which we could use on the court. I think from a more liberal perspective, election of Senator Obama would more save the court then change it.”
10:08 pm ET: ABC News' Jackie Hyland: In Arizona, 57 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of John McCain. The Hispanic vote was up 4 points from 2004 to 16 percent. In New Mexico, 40 percent of voters were Hispanic. Obama lost the Hispanic vote in the primary but he didn’t have problem winning it today in New Mexico.
10:06 pm ET: ABC News is projecting that Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives and gain seats.
10:00 pm ET: In Iowa, ABC News projects Obama will win. This is a state President Bush carried in 2004 and McCain had to hold on to have a real shot. In Utah, ABC News projects McCain will win. The new total of projected votes in the electoral college: 207 for Obama, 135 for McCain.
9:57 pm ET: Things are very much in Sen. Obama's favor right now. Big states like Ohio and Pennsylvania are falling to him and he is starting to build a commanding lead. Sen. McCain will have to pull off a serious upset to have a shot at this. So far, 200 electoral votes for Obama and 130 for McCain.
9:50 pm ET: Based on the exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain will win Mississippi. Not a surprise there.
9:47 pm ET: Tom Moe, former Vietnam POW with McCain: “The whole mood has been one of we can win this. Any other candidate wouldn’t have even been in this race by this time. It’s because of McCain that we remain optimistic. We will remain loyal to him just as he has been to this country.”
9:41 pm ET: Based on the exit polls and analysis of the vote so far, ABC News projects McCain has won Texas.
9:40 pm ET: Per ABC News' Jackie Hyland: 61 percent of voters in Ohio said economy was the most important issue. 56 percent said they are very worried about the economy. 71 percent of voters said they disapprove of President Bush’s job over the last four years. 56 percent said they decided to vote before October. It seems like they made up their mind quite some time ago.
9:38 pm ET: Faye Wattleton, president, Center for the Advancement of Women: The numbers prove that we can be comfortable with someone other than a white man for president. Obama’s ability to speak across many platforms and to young voters has made a huge difference.
9:37 pm ET: With New Mexico also falling to Obama, it's getting nearly impossible for Team McCain to pull off.
9:31 pm ET: Based on our projections, Obama has 195 electoral votes so far and McCain has 90.
9:30 pm ET: Based on the exit poll and our analysis of the vote in so far, ABC News projects that in the Presidential race, McCain will win West Virginia and Louisiana.
9:26 pm ET: Ohio is as big a win as it can get for Obama and puts him in a strong position. It means not just a victory, but it means a very big victory. So far, Obama has 195 electoral votes and McCain has McCain. This is a symbolic victory because no Republican has been elected to the White House without winning Ohio, where economy was a very significant factor. This is also a state where Obama lost to Sen. Hillary Clinton.
9:23 pm ET: ABC News projects Ohio will go to Obama and all four electoral votes in Maine.
9:22 pm ET: Celinda Lake, democratic political strategist: “Obama is the first president of a new generation, he’s not a baby boomer president. He ran the first modern campaign of the twenty-first century and he has a world vision which is very very strong. Generation Y is deeply in debt and without jobs, and his economic message has had a lot of appeal to that cohort.”
9:15 pm ET: We are projecting that Republican Mitch McConnell will defeat Democrat Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky.
9:09 pm ET: ABC News' Jackie Hyland: 79 percent of voters said that things in the U.S. are headed in the wrong track. 52 percent say they are worse off than they were in 2004. 63 percent said they disapprove of the war in Iraq. 72 percent disapprove of the way President Bush has done his job. The high disapproval numbers could be one of the reasons why we haven't seen President Bush at all in the heat of this humid campaign.
9:08 pm ET: So far, 55 seats for Democrats in the Senate and 34 for Republicans.
9:07 pm ET: Our projections show that Obama has a total of 174 electoral votes and McCain has 61 electoral votes. A total of 270 is needed to win presidency.
9:03 pm ET: Per ABC News' Vinnie Malhotra, Oprah Winfrey has just arrived at the Grant Park location. As she passed through security (surrounded by multiple cameras) she was overheard saying, "I am vibrating."
9:00 pm ET: Based on exit polls, we project that Obama will win New York as expected, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Rhode Island and McCain will win Georgia, Kansas, North Dakota and Wyoming.
8:58 pm ET: Wow -- in Massachusetts, people voted by a 2-1 margin for higher taxes -- against a repeal of the income tax. Remarkable.
8:38 pm ET: Lynette Clemetson, managing editor of theroot.com: “The overall story is the turnout overall, and so while you have a portion of the black electorate that has been extremely energized I don’t know yet whether it will turn up overall numbers… I think we are going to see, with all segments of voters, that the economy trumped race in a lot of ways tonight… This will be a race that makes us challenge a lot of assumptions we have about race.”
8:35 pm ET: ABC News' Jackie Hyland: 53 percent of white women voted for Obama in Pennsylvania. The time and money Obama's campaign spent in Pennsylvania seems to be paying off for them.
8:31 pm ET: Another big victory for the Democrats -- In the state of North Carolina, little-known Democrat Kay Hagan has defeated Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Senate minority leader Bob Dole. Elizabeth Dole ran an ad that implied her opponent did not believe in God, which Sam Donaldson believes acted against her. Dole did not think she had a serious race on her hand until very late. One key factor that helped Hagan is the battered North Carolina economy.
8:29 pm ET: ABC News projects McCain will win Arkansas and Alabama. That brings the total to 49 electoral votes for McCain and 102 electoral votes for Obama.
8:25 pm ET: Some more projections -- Democratic governor candidate Jay Nixon will beat the Republicans in Missouri. In New Hampshire, the very popular Democratic governor John Lynch will win reelections. In Delaware, the projected winner is Democrat Jack Markell, which is critical because he will have a lot of say on who fills Joe Biden's Senate seat.
8:22 pm ET: Per ABC News' Dan Harris, the McCain campaign disputes ABC's projection in Pennsylvania.
8:12 pm ET: ABC News' Jackie Hyland Reports: In Pennsylvania, 83 percent of voters said race was not an important factor.
8:10 pm ET: Crystia Freeland makes an interesting point -- Had the country not experienced an economic downturn, would we have seen these numbers, especially in Pennsylvania, tip in Obama's favor?
8:05 pm ET: Based on the exit polls, we project that Obama will win Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. McCain will win Oklahoma and Tennessee.
8:00 pm ET: A huge projection at 8 pm -- Pennsylvania goes for Obama. You just heard a big deflation in McCain's world -- this takes so many paths to 270 off the table for him...
7:51 pm ET: In Virginia, there are almost 500,000 new registered voters and that's remarkable. It's astounding to see a 10 percent jump in the number of registrants. As Lynn Sanders, associate professor at University of Virginia, said, she remembers a time when in Virginia, people could hardly notice a presidential election was going on. "It's the new dominion now." According to Chrystia Freeland, U.S. Managing Editor at the Financial Times: "Virginia has shifted from being a southern state to Mid-Atlantic state, and that's really significant."
7:33 pm ET: Based on preliminary exit poll results, ABC News projects that incumbent Governor Joe Manchin will win in West Virginia, and Democrat Jay Rockefeller will take West Virginia Senate seat.
7:30 pm ET: The polls have closed in West Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina -- the last two being very important states -- but we do not have enough information yet to make projections for those states.
7:18 pm ET: In Indiana, ABC News can project that Republican Governor Mitch Daniels will win the re-election.
7:14 pm ET: I'm struck by some dogs that haven't barked -- the national exit polls have the portion of the black vote up just two points, from 11 in 2004 to 13 in 2008. Similar numbers among younger voters. They turned out -- but not in overwhelming, ground-shifting numbers.
7:11 pm ET: ABC News projects Democrat Mark Warner will win Virginia Senate seat.
7:05 pm ET: Based on preliminary exit polls, 75 percent of the people who went to polls today were white, down from 77 percent in 2004. 13 percent of those who voted were black, up from 11 percent in 2004. About 17 percent of those who voted today were between the ages of 18 and 29. The results also show that 11 percent of those who voted were first-time voters, and those numbers did not change significantly.
7:00 pm ET: The polls have closed in six states. Based on exit polls, ABC News projects that Sen. John McCain will win in Kentucky (eight electoral votes) and Sen. Barack Obama will win in Vermont (three electoral votes). We do not have enough information to project in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina.
6:43 pm ET: What does voter outreach mean? Well -- a few nuggets from the preliminary exit polls in Virginia tell that story.
Courtesy of ABC polling director Gary Langer: According to the preliminary exits, 51 percent of voters say they were personally contacted by an Obama campaign worker; 37 percent were contacted by the McCain campaign.
This is the kind of number that looked much different four years ago, when all the commentary was about the Republicans’ “72-hour” voter contact/get-out-the-vote program.
And the top issue? 59 percent say the economy. Iraq is a distant No. 12, at 12 percent, followed by energy policy (10 percent), terrorism (9 percent), and health care (7 percent).
6:05 pm ET: Rick Klein here from ABC’s The Note -- we start live on ABC NewsNOW (me and Sam Donaldson) starting at 7 pm ET.
Click HERE to watch our livestream -- and be part of the conversation all night on this blog.
A quick note on what I’m watching for early tonight: Much of the story of the election might be told in just two states, both of which close their polls early.
If Virginia (polls close 7 pm ET) goes Obama, look for a big Obama night. That’s a key test of whether demographics is destiny, and of whether black voters and young voters come out in the sort of numbers the Obama campaign expects. If he wins there, he takes away McCain’s very limited wiggle room.
But if Pennsylvania (polls close 8 pm ET) goes McCain, McCain has options tonight. This is a big electoral pick-up (21 votes) that can balance out losses elsewhere. If Obama takes the Keystone State early, he’s locked in the Kerry states in all likelihood -- then he can depend on pickups out west to put him over 270.
What are you looking for tonight?
November 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (324) | TrackBack (0)
MoveOn.org Plans Continued Pro-Obama Push
November 04, 2008 1:23 PM
From ABC’s Rick Klein, author of The Note.
Welcome back to the live blog -- I’ll be blogging here all day for Election Day -- leading up to our coverage on ABC NewsNOW tonight, starting at 7 pm ET. The live feed of our coverage, featuring me and Sam Donaldson from New York, will be available online at ABCNews.com/politics.
One of the most fascinating questions for an Obama administration to answer -- if, indeed, there is an Obama administration to talk about after tonight -- is what he’ll do with the activist army that’s signed on to his cause.
One big segment of that army is already figuring out what it plans to do for Obama -- again, with the important caveat that first he has to win the election.
I spoke with Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, about what they’ve done for Obama during the election, plus what’s next.
Pariser said he plans to put the 4.3 million members of his organization to work on behalf of a President Obama -- even if that will mean, at times, taking on Democratic leaders in Congress.
"We may be able to do some things that Obama, playing the delicate, inside game of winning votes handshake by handshake, may not be able to do," Pariser said. "It’s an extraordinary opportunity... There’s an alignment on what we want to accomplish, and what the people in the Obama movement want to accomplish. I expect we’ll be working shoulder-to-shoulder with them."
This represents something of a rethinking of the MoveOn.org mission. Founded in 1998, in a grass-roots effort to get the country to "move on" from President Bill Clinton’s impeachment inquiry, the group has defined itself as an outside voice, not an inside player.
But starting in February, with MoveOn’s decision to endorse Obama in the Democratic primary -- the group’s first presidential endorsement -- an important transition began.
In one little-noticed move, MoveOn.org effectively merged its organizing operations and get-out-the-vote projects with the Obama campaign’s. Rather than running parallel GOTV campaigns, like the group did in 2004 and 2006, MoveOn worked in tandem with the campaign.
Pariser said MoveOn dedicated roughly 15 staffers to a legally separate operation -- similar to the way unions and the national parities set up "independent expenditure" arms -- primarily to handle online organizing geared toward boosting Obama’s prospects.
More importantly, the group directed as many as 600,000 volunteers to the Obama campaign, Pariser said. He said the group spent nearly $30 million to help elect Obama.
Pariser said he thinks it’s critical for Obama, if he wins, to utilize the people who have invested in his campaign.
"It’s incredibly important that they take what they built forward," he said.
A continued alignment with MoveOn.org and groups brings some political risk to Obama. He seems inclined to govern from the center, and he’ll have millions of supporters pulling him to the left.
If those supporters are noisy about it, he may antagonize the congressional leaders who hold the keys to actually enacting his agenda. And those supporters may end up getting noisy about their disagreements with Obama, too, particularly if his plans to withdraw troops from Iraq get delayed in any way.
Pariser said he sees an opportunity for partnership -- while cautioning that his members will stick by their beliefs.
"If Obama wins, fundamentally his organization will be driven from the White House -- it can’t not be. That’s good, that’s important. But it’s different than an organization like MoveOn, which is driven by members toward the White House," he said. "They may converge in the same place, but they come from different places."
What do you think?
-- Rick Klein
November 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (71) | TrackBack (0)
