At last! Jon Stewart is on the Comedy Channel
Nothing much is moving with regard to calling important states. The next poll closings are not until 11:00 EST. The easy things to call are the solid blue and red states. The networks are afraid of making major errors, as they had in 2000, so they are being careful about calling the key battleground states.
That doesn’t give the analysts much to talk about. There is interesting evidence that the youth vote is breaking for Kerry in a big way and also that young people are coming out in record numbers. (Since they mostly don’t show up much, if a sprinkling did, that would be record numbers.) In Florida the first-time voters are about 9 percent according to exit polls. There is also some indication that the African American voters have come out in very large numbers.
I haven’t seen any comments about ethnic voting trends outside the African Americans, or about class-based voting. I went to a Kerry rally in Detroit on Monday and was interested to see that the Teamsters were backing him. They had gone Republican under Reagan. Is this a trend or a one-off thing? I’m not interested in what Tucker Carlson or Paul Begala have to say. Why don’t we have some real reporting on election night? Surely there are a thousand good stories to get.
But at least from 10-11 EST we have some wit and irony to break the tension, over at Comedy Central.