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It's Election Day! Remember to vote!
• Election Night: Tonight will be a very busy night, with plenty of races to watch all over the country. To help keep track of everything, I've put put together an hour-by-hour guide to the evenings' House, Senate, and gubernatorial races, arranged by poll closing time. There's a lot to look forward to: Polls start to close in Kentucky at 6:00 PM Eastern, with the Aleutian Islands finishing at 1:00 AM Eastern. We'll be liveblogging the results every step of the way and beyond. (Jeff Singer)
• County Benchmarks: One of the most enjoyable Daily Kos Elections traditions are our county benchmarks, which tell you how well each Democratic candidate needs to do in his or her state's largest counties in order to hit the 50 percent mark statewide. David Jarman has once again performed this analysis for over a dozen key states, so click through for all the numbers, and be sure to keep these benchmarks open in a tab all night as the returns come in.
9:04 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Race Ratings: The only race rating that matters is on Election Day... wait, that's not how the saying goes. You can check out all our ratings on our big board.
• IL-Gov (Tossup to Tossup/Tilt Democratic): Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn may be both American's unluckiest and luckiest politician. Quinn has been unpopular in this solidly blue state for a long time and is always tottering on the edge of defeat, yet he's twice drawn very flawed Republican rivals.
Wealthy businessman Bruce Rauner looked like the favorite over the summer, often leading by double digits. However, Quinn and his allies have relentlessly portrayed Rauner as an out-of-touch rich guy, and revelations about Rauner's offshore Cayman Island accounts only made their job easier. Most recent polls indicate that Quinn is now the narrow favorite, and our Daily Kos Election Outlook gives him a 64 percent chance to win. Neither side has much room for error and a Rauner victory wouldn't be a surprise, but it does appear that Quinn can pull this off.
• MA-Gov (Tossup to Lean Republican): It's hard to feel good about Democrat Martha Coakley's odds today. With the exception of YouGov, every pollster has given a lead to Republican Charlie Baker for the last week, and even Coakley's own internal recently found her down 2 points. Our Election Outlook gives Coakley only a 15 percent chance to win, not exactly an optimistic number.
Coakley has run a much smoother campaign than she did in the 2010 Senate special election, but she's been outspent badly on the airwaves and voters have traditionally preferred a Republican governor to counterbalance the Democratic legislative supermajorities. The GOP made an expensive gamble over the summer when they started spending millions at a time when this looked like an easy Democratic victory, and their bet looks like it will pay off.
• NV-04 (Lean Democratic to Tossup/Tilt Democratic): Democrats continue to see nasty early voting numbers out of the Silver State, and Rep. Steven Horsford is in real danger of losing his Obama 54-45 seat. Both parties have been spending here and Team Blue even brought in Bill Clinton to rally the faithful, but Democratic turnout remains poor. Republican Cresent Hardy is an unimpressive candidate but just by being in the right place at the right time, he could be headed to Washington. This district is blue enough that Horsford has a bit of room for error so we still think he's the narrow favorite, but this seat could go either way today.
10:12 AM PT (Taniel): Early Voting: In Florida, the final early voting report shows that registered Republicans' edge among early voters is 3.2 percentage points; that's a raw lead of 98,000 votes. In Iowa, the final early voting report from Iowa shows that registered Democrats' edge sits at 1.8 percentage points. 21% more registered Democrats voted absentee than they were in 2010; there were 33% more Republicans.
These numbers are essentially the same as those that Iowa and Florida released yesterday, so I will refer you to my lengthy analysis from yesterday for an explanation of how these numbers compare to past cycles and what they tell us about tonight.
There is one big question mark in Iowa: About 75,000 voters requested absentee ballots but have not returned them. 44 percent of these voters are Democrats, while just 26 percent are Republicans. It is imperative for Democrats to have mobilized these voters. These ballots are valid as long as they postmarked by Monday. Iowa voters who requested an absentee ballot but did not send in can still vote in-person today, either by surrendering their absentee ballot or by casting a provisional ballot.
10:54 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Election Night:
At Daily Kos Elections, we spend every day of the election cycle following every important race across the country. Now that Election Day is finally upon us, here are a bunch of excellent resources that we've put together to help make sense of all the returns as they come in:
- Our hour-by-hour guide to the most important contests in every state, organized by the times poll close, and our key race tracker, which we'll keep updated in real-time as races are called tonight.
- Our awesome color-coded poll closing time map (reproduced above). Note that all times are Eastern.
- Our "county benchmarks," which tell you how well each Democratic candidate has to do in his or her state's largest counties in order to win 50 percent of the vote statewide. (We have benchmarks for more than a dozen critical states.)
- Our nationwide guides to all the most critical down-ballot races:
- Our race ratings for Senate, gubernatorial, and House races, as well as our colleague Carolyn Fiddler's ratings for state legislatures (more on those here).
- The Daily Kos Election Outlook, our poll-driven model that analyzes each party's chances in all the Senate and gubernatorial races, and Steve Singiser's invaluable poll database, so that you can see what powered these projections—and evaluate who called the elections correctly.
If you know of any other good election night resources, please link them in comments. And be sure to check back in when polls close at 6 PM ET for the Daily Kos liveblog!
11:23 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Babka: There's still time to enter the Daily Kos Elections prediction contest! The deadline is at 4 PM ET today. You can enter as many times as you like, but only the last entry submitted before the deadline will be scored. As always, the winner will receive delicious babka from Green's Bakery.
2:34 PM PT: Liveblog: It's liveblog time! Head to the front page of Daily Kos for our election night liveblog. The first thread is already up!