Senate Dems Pick Up Sixth Seat

With 92% of the votes counted, Jeff Merkley will win the Senate seat from Oregon. He leads Incumbent Sen. Gordon Smith by about 43,000 votes.

Four Senate Seats Not Yet Called

The Democrats picked up five seats in the Senate -- Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia. Four more remain too close to call.

The election in Georgia will most likely to head to a runoff.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday afternoon, Chambliss had 1,841,449 votes, or 49.9 percent of the total, while Martin had 1,727,625 votes, or 47 percent. Libertarian Allen Buckley had 126,328 votes, or 3 percent.

Secretary of State Karen Handel said the election results will not be officially certified until sometime next week.

Norm Coleman leads Al Franken by about 720 votes and will trigger a recount under state law.

According to the figures, posted on the secretary of state's Web site, Coleman received 1,211,616 votes, or 42 percent, and Franken garnered 1,210,895 votes, or 41.97 percent. The vote count kept changing slightly as more counties reported their results.

Recounts are triggered in Minnesota when the winning margin is less than half of 1 percent.

"One half of one percent is 15,000 votes," Aiken said. "We are looking at a couple hundred here."

Ted Stevens leads challenger Mark Begich by about 4,000 votes.

Still to be counted are roughly 40,000 absentee ballots, with more expected to arrive in the mail, as well as 9,000 uncounted early votes and thousands of questioned ballots. The state Elections Division has up to 15 days after the election to tally all the remaining ballots before finalizing the count.

If the lead holds, Stevens will shock the nation and be the first person ever re-elected to the U.S. Senate after being found guilty on criminal charges.

In Oregon, Merkley (D) trails Gordon Smith by about a 1,000 votes. Merkley's prospects look promising though as most of the outstanding results will be coming from Lane and Multnomah Counties. You can get the most recent vote tallies for the Oregon race here.

Lower Turnout in Oregon

Nate Silver points out that according to Oregon's "Elections Division, the state has received 522,188 ballots through the first seven days of its early voting window. This compares with 645,473 ballots received during the first seven days of 2004 -- a 19 percent decline."

Silver also observes that decline is steeper in counties that are more Republican. He posits that Obama's large leads in the polls, lack of enthusiasm for McCain, and a bitter Senate race may be causing the decline in early voting.

I wonder if the nasty primary in Oregon's fifth district has also led people to hold on to their ballots until later. Conventional wisdom is that the eventual nominee, Mike Erickson, would never have won the primary in CD 5 if people hadn't already mailed in their ballots.

Two other things to note -- How does the drop in early voting from Republican counties affect the Senate race? Oregon and Washington are fairly close, culturally and politically. Will Washington have a similarly lower turnout and if so, how will it affect the gubernatiorial race?

Senate 2008: NH, NC, and OR

The Hill: Oregon Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Merkley has solidified a small but consistent polling lead over Republican incumbent Gordon Smith in the Beaver State.

Hagan has slim leads in two new polls out of North Carolina.

A Research 2000 poll shows Shaheen ahead by 7 points. (The same poll also shows the Dems ahead in both congressional districts, and Obama beating McCain.)

Golf Clubs and Social Security

The DSCC puts out two new ads hitting Gordon Smith on Social Security. The one below is creative and very well done. The second one is more traditional, and a little boring. The race in Oregon is tight but Merkley has a good shot at unseating Smith.



(H/T: SSP)

Election Year Moderation

Congressional Quarterly highlights waning support for President Bush as Republicans prepare for a tough election in November.

Until last year, Bush had historically high support scores among Republicans: No GOP president had done as well among fellow party members since 1953, when Congressional Quarterly began tabulating these things. Not even Ronald Reagan could boast of Bush’s degree of support.

GOP House members voted Bush’s way between 80 percent and 89 percent of the time on roll calls where he took a clear position during his first six years. Among Republican senators, his average support score had been even higher, reaching 94 percent twice, in 2001 and 2003.

In both chambers, Bush’s support faded a bit in 2007, but this year it has fallen through the floor. The average House Republican supported him just 63 percent of the time in 2008, and the average GOP senator, 68 percent.

The chart below highlights some of the more blatant attempts at election year moderation, especially among Senators facing tough reelection battles. The percentages in the chart show how often the Senator in question supported Bush on roll call votes. For the original and complete chart, follow the link to the CQ article.

Hall of Fame

Steve Novick is an unusual candidate and he ran some very unusual ads in the race for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat. He went on to lose narrowly to Jeff Merkley in the Democratic primary but I feature this ad mostly because it highlights the clever use of humor as a hook (pun intended) in political advertising.



And just in case you missed this piece in the bio that I linked to earlier, here's the story on the hook.

Novick was born with significant physical disabilities which include a missing left hand and missing fibula bones in his legs. As a result he uses a hook prosthesis and stands approximately 4'9" tall. His unusual physicality has prompted him to use the slogan "The Fighter with the Hard Left Hook." His levity about his physical stature has drawn both positive and negative reviews from the press.

The Scarlet Letter

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) knows that his party label is huge liability in Oregon and he's tried just about everything short of leaving the Republican party. One of Smith's ads features former Democratic state lawmakers. Another ad makes it seem like Obama was endorsing him. The third features John Kerry. Smith's latest ad portrays him as a maverick on Iraq.



Smith recently resigned as McCain's co-chair for Oregon although he was an early supporter of Sen. McCain's candidacy. He will also be absent from the Republican convention in St. Paul.

Time will tell if Oregon voters will overlook the "R" next Gordon Smith but the ads themselves are pretty well made. His Democratic challenger and the Speaker of the Oregon House, Jeff Merkeley might want to start highlighting Smith's election-year moderation before the narrative about Smith being a maverick gets any more established.