Apparently at this polling place in 2004, there were 100 voters total for the whole day. We just passed 110 [at 10:00 am EST].

Since, as James Carville says, Pennsylvania is Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Alabama in between, Obama needs margins as large as possible in urban areas to overcome McCain’s rural advantage. This is a good start.

Update:

My source says that the most voters her location has ever had is 340. At 10:15 this morning, the location passed 130.

I would say, “Give consideration to your eternal salvation.” Because to vote for a person who has expressed a fanatical determination to not only support abortion as it exists now but to remove all limitations on it through the Freedom of Choice Act, and to extend it without any recourse, throwing out all of the efforts of citizens over the last 35 years to place reasonable limits on abortion, that voting for a person who has expressed his determination to do this to Planned Parenthood, to NARAL – that you make yourself a participant in the act of abortion. That’s gravely wrong, and you mustn’t do it because your eternal salvation is tied up in that important choice.

Of course, the religious right doesn’t want to impose their religious views on the rest of us.  No, no. On the contrary, it’s their culture and their values which are under attack — they’re just defending themselves.

In many ways, tomorrow really is about progress and hope vs. a bunch of Dark Ages throwbacks.  Go vote.

Barack Obama sat down for an interview with MTV’s Sway that aired today, and one of the questions he was asked concerned a ban on sagging pants.

“Do feel like people should be penalized?” Sway asked.

“Here is my attitude: I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time,” Obama responded. “We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq, and anybody, any public official, that is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants.”

He continued: “You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don’t have to pass a law, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear – I’m one of them.”

McCain trails Obama in every recent poll in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, and Florida. To win, he likely needs to win not one but all of those states. While Nate Silver sees “a hair’s worth of tightening” on the state level, he pegs the odds of Obama winning at 96.3%. 

On ABC’s This Week, the panel made these predictions:

Mark Halperin, Time Magazine:
Electoral Vote — 349 Obama

Matthew Dowd, former Republican strategist:
Electoral Vote — 338 plus Obama

George Will, ABC News contributor:
Electoral Vote — 378 Obama
Donna Brazile, former Democratic strategist:
Electoral Vote — Obama 343

George Stephanopoulos:
Electoral Vote — 353 Obama 

In the face of such overwhelmingly bad news, the McCain campaign has recently been touting its internal polls which, it claims, show “significant movement” in the battleground states:

McInturff, the campaign’s chief pollster, made a case for the viability of the campaign in a memo to the strategy team, which was released to the media late Tuesday. The campaign has seen the race between McCain and Barack Obama move “significantly over the past week,” McInturff said. “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis spent all weekend citing the campaign’s internals:

Iowa’s a good example. Public polling had it at 12 points. Our own data now has us dead even in the state of Iowa. And we understand Barack Obama probably has very similar polling. He’s now on his way back to Iowa as one of his last campaign stops. 

The McCain campaign hasn’t actually released any of the data backing up its claim that it sees significant movement in its internal polls, of course. (I haven’t seen an interview in which a reporter follows up on the claim with a request to review that data, either, but that’s another topic.)

If what the McCain camp says is true, it would be a massive momentum-builder.  Demoralized volunteers and supporters would enthusiastically rally — money would come in and Republican voters would flock to the polls.  Yet McCain refuses to release the polls which show a dramatic tightening not reflected in any public poll. A more cynical observer might suggest that the McCain campaign isn’t being entirely truthful and is instead just trying prevent its supporters from not showing up at all tomorrow.

Here are some campaigns which, unlike the McCain juggernaut, may not have been entirely truthful about what their late October or early November internal polls showed:

1988: While refusing to disclose details of internal polls, John Sasso, vice chairman of the Dukakis campaign, asserted today that Mr. Dukakis was closing Vice President Bush’s lead in Ohio, California and Texas.

*********

1992: [George H.W. Bush's] campaign sent [Michigan Governor John Engler] into the press briefing room to proclaim that the Republicans had delved into internal and public polls showing that Mr. Perot was eating into Gov. Bill Clinton’s lead and found that, instead, Mr. Bush was “closing” on the Democratic Presidential nominee.

*********

1996: Republicans said internal polls show the many Ohio appearances by the Dole-Kemp ticket paying dividends – the race is tightening, they said. Independent statewide polls, however, have shown former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole consistently trailing President Clinton by at least 8 percentage points.

And here’s a bonus quote from H.W. Bush supporter John Engler in 1992:

The Republican Governor was immediately asked why his remarks were any different from Democratic assertions of a last-minute “surge” for Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. “This is real,” Mr. Engler snapped. “His wasn’t.”

We’ll see tomorrow.

Update:

McCain to sweep New Jersey, Michigan — maybe even California, say PUMA geniuses:

Pawlenty is young, well spoken, and popular in a Democratic state. Had he been picked, McCain today might’ve been competitive in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. McCain knew better, of course, selected Sarah Palin and is today on the verge of a landslide loss, which, according to the polls, is due at least in part to Palin.

Today, Pawlenty appeared on CNN’s Late Edition.  At about 6:44, note the word Pawlenty doesn’t use when asked whether the selection of Sarah Palin was a “mistake” (hint: it begins with “n” and ends with “o”):

“They’ll be debating that question for a long time.”  A long, long time.  During the Republican presidential primary in 2012, for example.

Just like they did four years ago:

The head of the Hillsborough GOP, David Storck, distributed an email from a Republican Party volunteer saying the voters are a threat.

That’s because, as the volunteer says in the email, he sees “car loads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes for Obama.”

It goes on to say, “This is their chance to get a black president and they seem to care little the he is at minimum a socialist and probably Marxist in his core beliefs.” The Republican volunteer says that is because, “After all he is black- no experience or accomplishments but he is black.”

All of this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about two weeks ago.  She told me that her husband is a “hardcore Republican,” and that while he acknowledged that Obama was up, he was still hopeful that the Bradley Effect would provide enough of a surge to put McCain over the top. I remember being extremely grateful that I don’t belong to political party that hopes for the existence of more racism in this country than is apparent.