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8:29 AM PT: PA-12: Rep. Mark Critz, my new favorite Democrat (at least for today):
"We're in a fight," Critz said. "You hate to say it, 'us against them.' This is the middle class' stand, and because of you folks we're going to do this. We're going to put my size 10 1/2 shoe up Keith Rothfus' rear end. So, when he goes back to Grover Norquist, and (Rep. Pete) Sessions, and (House Speaker John) Boehner, and (Rep. Eric) Cantor and (Gov.) Mitt Romney, he can say, 'Can you read this? What size shoe is this?' because it's going to come out of his mouth I'm going to shove it so far up there."
WHAT SIZE SHOE IS THIS, MITT ROMNEY? Man, that is just epic.
9:43 AM PT (David Jarman): Benchmarks: One more helpful Election Day link: county benchmarks in the presidential swing states (and non-swing states with big Senate races). This can help you cut through the clutter as different counties report at different rates tonight.
11:04 AM PT: The Daily Kos Elections prediction contest is still open until 6pm ET. Get your guesses in if you haven't yet! Babka for the winner!
11:09 AM PT: If you haven't bookmarked our poll closing times map and list of key races, you'll want to do so now.
(click for larger version)
11:33 AM PT: Bored of the 2012 elections already? Community member AndySonSon dug through all of the numbers relevant to 2014 in PPP's massive batch of last-minute polls. Some of the results are very surprising, like Dem Gov. Dan Malloy's rebound to 46-38 job approvals in CT-Gov, along with a 48-37 lead over Generic R. (Malloy has had some of the worst ratings of any pol PPP's tested over the last couple of years.) Many more races at the link.
11:41 AM PT (David Jarman): Washington: Your main memory of Washington state elections may be the interminable wait for King County to finish its counting. (This, in fact, often skews the way statewide results are reported, since the smaller rural counties usually report much quicker and give much scarier-looking results, which gradually improve.) Well, streamlining at the King County's Board of Elections may speed things up considerably: they're expecting to count 60% of the ballots by tonight, up from 33% in 2010. One caveat, though; state law still only requires ballots to be postmarked, not received, by election day, so the counting will still continue for days.
11:41 AM PT: UT-04: What the holy hell? Is Mason-Dixon trying to unskew one of its own polls? The Salt Lake Tribune reports that M-D "revised" its final polls of both Utah's 4th Congressional District and the Salt Lake County mayoral race because the original figures "included too many Republicans in both the county and 4th Congressional District and undersampled Democrats in both races." This is probably as good a reason as any as to why you shouldn't weight by party ID, but it sounds like Mase-Dix really screwed up here:
Twenty percent of those sampled said they were Democrats, 48 percent said Republican and 32 percent said independent. That was close to accepted breakdowns of party affiliation statewide, said Coker, "but intuitively we know Salt Lake County is more Democratic than the rest of the state." It would have been more accurate to weight Democratic affiliation in Salt Lake County at closer to 25 percent, with Republicans at 43 percent, he added.
But "we finished the poll on Wednesday night. We're pulling [the results] together at 3 a.m. I'm cranking to get this out to [The Tribune] Thursday morning," Coker said, and he did not notice that the party-affiliation figures for weighting were off. "It slipped between the cracks when we were pulling that information together and trying to put it out quick. … That's something I normally would have caught."
He checked the numbers again after being asked over the weekend to do so by The Tribune.
I don't think I've ever seen a pollster do that, but in any event, the numbers moved UT-04 from a 52-40 lead for Republican Mia Love over Dem Rep. Jim Matheson down to a 50-43 edge. Weird as this move is, the "revised" spread is still not very optimistic for the incumbent. The mayoral alteration is much more dramatic: A 48-38 edge for Republican Mark Crockett over Dem Ben McAdams has been sliced down to a 44-43 jump ball. That's an extraordinary error to make right before election day.
11:53 AM PT: NY-St. Sen: Chris Bragg of Crain's has a good review of the eight most competitive races in the New York state Senate, and even rates them as Tossup, Lean D, and Lean R (plus one "Wildcard"). Republicans hold a 33-29 advantage right now, and Dems have an exceedingly uphill battle for control of the chamber, since the GOP drew its own map earlier this year. Dems would need to defend two contested seats and somehow pick up three (Republicans added a new 63rd seat, so 32 are needed for control). Party politics are very confusing, though, in the Senate, with a lot of wayward Dems who might caucus with the GOP, so raw numbers will only tell you so much. Depending on how things shake out, it could be a while before we know who actually will be running the show next year.
11:56 AM PT: KS-St. Sen: Community member ptgkc has a good post summarizing the state of play in the Kansas state Senate. As you may recall, the conservative wing of the KS GOP succeeded in a massive purge of so-called "moderate" Republican senators in the primaries earlier this year. However, there's still a slim chance that the moderate-Democratic coalition that's ruled the chamber for some time could survive tonight. The odds admittedly don't look good, but click through to see the exact math.
12:02 PM PT: The Live Digest continues here.