Georgia. With 47% of last times turnout having already voted Black turnout is over 35% of the total vote so far. Black support of Obama in Georgia is 99%. Last time Black turnout was about 25% of the total. I’ve seen it calculated that if Black turnout is over 31% of the total and indeed goes 99% Obama (as it has been polling) then he just needs about 28% of the non-Black vote to win. Yeah it is doable.
Texas I won’t bore you with my figures again, but if Hispanics turnout and go just 60/40 Obama then it could be a surprise. Lots of voters who have not been counted as they are not traditional “likely voters.” A big if but a key one. Big early voting in urban areas has been a good sign. See here. (you can get to pat numbers on that site.)
Shayna, I hesitate to take issue with your posts, since I just love your enthusiasm and energy. However, Louisville is about 100 miles from Cincinnati. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone here who considers Louisville to be in Cincinnati’s sphere. The Cincinnati area airport is in KY, but it’s only like 10 miles from downtown. Louisville (a fine city to visit, by the way), is just…different.
Shayna…perhaps you can answer, as someone who’s close to the ground operation: we do seem to be seeing massive increases in early voting. How much of that is attributable to changes in voting patterns overall (early voting becoming easier)? Or are Obama workers encouraging their voters to vote early…perhaps in anticipation of election day voter suppression shenanigans?
:smack: I meant Kentucky, not Louisville specifically. Bah. That’ll teach me to try to juggle posting and answering the phones at work at the same time. Thanks for the correction!
Actually, lines should be shorter on election day, as there will be a lot more polling places open then. Still, the fact that people are willing to wait 8 hours to vote is striking.
There is a potential problem for working stiff voters, though. Georgia law only requires an employer to give a worker two hours off to vote. I can easily imagine some Republican employers playing hardball with that rule to try to keep employees away from the polls: “If you’re not back here in two hours, you’re fired.”
I understand employment law attorneys in Georgia have been fielding a lot of calls from employers this week.
I think it’s both, plus the fact that this is such an historic election, people are actually excited to participate. This notion that Obama supporters in particular, will get complacent and stay home is a red herring. Won’t happen. People who support Obama aren’t just interested in him winning, they’re interested in being PART of him winning. They want to tell their children and grandchildren that they voted in this election. NO ONE is going to sit home on the Democratic side. No one.
Twitter is what’s known as “microblogging.” Think of it as a way to IM a large number of people, without having to get bogged down by two way conversations. You’re limited to 144 characters in a message which is called a “Tweet.” Hillary and Obama use Twitter as well. Its an effective way to give out up to the minute information to people, without having to go through the media.
Oh, let me add that I’ve been following McCain via Twitter since the primaries, and McCainNews is quite clearly the official Twitter feed of the campaign, and not one of the either fan or gag (as in joke) Twitter feeds out there.
Yes, and no. Its a little more flexible than those things, and a bit more restrictive as well. You can send Tweets to specific individuals, and there are Twitter clients like Twhirl which work sort of like AIM or ICQ or Messenger, that you can have running, so that you can send or recieve Tweets without having to open your web browser or email client. One thing that you can do with Twitter than you can’t do with email, etc. is there are clients for things like the iPhone that will put your location in a Tweet. So, if you’ve got a good sized following, and you want to let them know where you are (or find out if any of your followers are in the area), you can send out a Tweet which is automatically stamped with your location. This allows for impromptu meet ups.
Comcast is using Twitter as part of their customer service program. They have people who scan Tweets looking for people posting complaints about Comcast, and then offer to help the people with their problem. The guys Comcast has monitoring Twitter aren’t your low wage flunkies, either, they’re fairly high up on the food chain at Comcast (think low-level executives). Leo Laporte did an interview some months back with the guy who set the program up with Twitter. (I can’t remember if Leo did it on an episode of This Week in Tech, or one of his other podcasts.)
