Yes We Did

Community organizers FTW.

I have not seen quite so much flesh in quite a while.

Crying everywhere.

In the end, when I’m up against the wall, I’m with America.

President-elect Obama. Oh yes.

Sad News From Hawaii

Obama’s grandmother has died on the eve of the election.

Today is traditionally the final day of electioneering, but the McCain appears to be holding at least one rally in New Mexico tomorrow (hopefully, it'll go better than the 1,000 strong crowd in Tampa today). The Obama camp isn't resting on their laurels either, knocking on a million doors in Ohio today, where reports suggest that he may be substantially ahead in early voting. The lesson learned: mock community organisers at your peril.

And we have the polls. They're here, there, and everywhere, but they all say pretty much the same thing - there's been a touch of tightening, but Obama still leads the battleground states, and is crushing McCain in early voting.

Your guide for tomorrow: Virginia closes at 7pm EST (midnight GMT). If Obama wins there, then McCain has to take Pennsylvania in order to have a chance of holding on. Georgia closes at the same time - if takes this, then the election is going to be a landslide victory. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina will close between 7:30 and 8:30. Colorado, and New Mexico follow an hour later, with Nevada coming in at 10pm. I'm guessing that it'll all be over by then, hopefully in Obama's favour, but I'm keeping fingers and toes crossed for the next 36 hours...

A Gentle Summary, If You Will.

Summing up.

By the by...

I think The Corner are going to be disappointed if they’re not thrown in gulags by the end of 2012…

And Again! Yay For David Mitchell!

How Britain came together in this time of crisis.

Grits, Grits, and more Grits!

Some of you with very long memories may remember that I once spoke of Durham in less-than-glowing terms. I’m happy to say that five years later, downtown Durham is a much brighter place than it was on that January morning. Maybe not all of the empty shop berths have been filled, but many have, and a decent amount of people in the area means that it no longer feels like ghost town. The only slight downside is that a lot of the city’s old buildings are being torn down to make fashionable condos for the gentrifying sect. Which is a shame, and perhaps unnecessary; I’m sure hipsters would jump at the chance of living in a converted tobacco factory.

Anyway, our Great Grits Gambit began yesterday in Durham. Two days, lots of grits. For those of you who think I might have gone crazy and started trying to eat the contents of gritting lorries, grits is a corn-based breakfast substance. There's been a long-standing joke that Stacie and I would go off to a restaurant in Chapel Hill so I could taste them for the first time, only to either forget, or get there after they've stopped serving breakfast. So this time, we're doing it properly - tasting the grits available in the Chapel Hill/Durham area!

We have problems.

Aside from the grits, we met up with Christa yesterday, interrupting her as she battled to get through her graduate work, kidnapping her scooter...the usual sorts of things. Plus a wander through Franklin Street, stopping at the new location of Chapel Hill Comics, Pumpkin Spice at Locopops, all while the sun beamed down on us. Oh, and we voted too! Well, I stood by while Luke went in and voted anyhow...

The Cat Is Stroking My Laptop

I’m not sure if it’s the credit crunch or American Airlines just taking advantage, but flight AA173 doesn’t seem to have taken the transfer from Gatwick to Heathrow all that well. Gone is the ultra-modern 777 with extra leg space and fancy game-playing TV sets mounted in the back of the seats, and in is a rather rickety 767-300 with three LCD panels for the entire cabin and a bit more room than your standard Ryanair trip. And the flight is an hour longer than it used to be. Still, considering the route doesn’t really have a reason to exist I can’t complain too much, I guess. Plus I still the new terminal at RDU to look forward to! And that airport won’t have the smug face of George Osbourne glaring at me from all the screens like in Heathrow this morning.

I miss my polls. I've lost an entire day of watching - I boarded the plane at 10 am GMT, so it was before the R2K poll was announced - I have no idea if it's still 50/45, or anything...it disturbs me that the first thing that I want to do after clearing Customs is to go to openleft.com and check everything that's been released. I can't be cut off from the information four days out! It's not right!

Although, as it turned out, the plane landed an hour early. The new RDU (open for about a week or so now) is pretty good - the long queue for customs officials has disappeared (it took me two minutes this time, and most of that was winding through the empty queue barriers), plus no more having to redo the security controls afterwards! Wonderful stuff!

My first night in the Triangle? Going out in Durham, knocking on people's doors and making sure that they know where their polling place is and that North Carolina has early voting that extends until Saturday at 5. In a non-partisan manner, I swear!

Leaving On A Jetplane Part 10? 11?: We're Stunted You And I

Off again. Check back soon for shenanigans!

You Are Beautiful. You Are Doomed.

It might not be an album. But gosh, it’s a pretty little package.

This Could Happen To You

Perhaps you’ve seen it. You’re at somebody’s house, a party, a bar, whatever, when somebody disappears for a moment or two. Maybe it’s a smoking break, you ponder. Five to ten minutes later, they come back, muttering under their breath; you can only catch certain words and phrases: “Rasmussen down by two”, “call those internal crosstabs fairly weighted?” and “Zogby couldn’t even place a may pole properly.”

Sad to say, my friends, this person has come down with a severe case of Poll Fever (closely related to the disease "When-Oh-God-When-Will-This-Election-Enditis"). Luckily, the stricken case will probably recover after November 4th, but until then, you need to be prepared for the major symptoms:

  • A need to be around a computer at certain times of the day.
  • Knowing exactly when R2K, Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, announce their polls, and refreshing Drudge at six every evening to see if the Zogby has leaked a good McCain result.
  • Sarcastic asides that if Pennsylvania is still considered a battleground state, then so is Kansas.
  • A need to cry out "Why can't they hold this thing today and be done with it?" during days of fluctuation.
  • A rash that mirrors the Gallup tracking poll, complete with roll-off and roll-on of new dates (in major cases).

If you are suffering, then please, think of your loved ones. And try and not make too much of a big deal of a point decrease in Ohio.

The ritual is almost comedic at this point. The polls come out at roughly the same time every day (this is altered for us here in the UK right now as we've moved our clocks back); if the poll is good for the Democrats, Republican sites rip the internals apart claiming that there's no way there's that many pinko-communists in America, whereas a good McCain day in a tracker poll makes half of DailyKos take to their office ledges.

But it's almost here now. Less than a week to go, and the Democrats still have a decent lead in the national tracking polls plus a commanding lead in the state polls. Early voting in Southern states appears to be going through the roof (as does the African-American vote), and Senator Ted Stevens can't vote for himself, being a convicted felon and all. Mind you, as we've seen so many times, never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot.

Meanwhile, Obama has just admitted what we knew all along. He is indeed a Communist sleeper agent:

In other news: what we learn from all this is that Andrew Sachs doesn't check his answerphone regularly. And that I don't understand how my country works half the time.