The 7 p.m. Poll Closings: Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia
ATLANTA - I'm en route to Bob Barr's election party, which won't kick off officially until after the polls close, which gave me time to grab a burger at the Varsity restaurant. A family next to me is talking about… Bob Barr. They didn't vote for him, they were just trying to remember who the LP candidate was.
The first wave of exit polls, which are being broadcast on the cable channels (Fox News in the Varsity), look ridiculously good for Obama. Not the state-by-states, which are bunk, but the fact that more voters would be "scared" of a McCain win than an Obama win, that only 10 percent more of the electorate thinks McCain has more relevant experience than Obama, and so on. Sometimes that data falls apart. If it's at all right, the electorate is basically where Obama wanted it.
I'll start checking it here at 7.
UPDATE: I'm at Barr HQ, and the exits are coming in. The borig guys first: The earliest exit polls have Obama taking Virginia, but the biggest problem for McCain is that people who decided today broke for Obama. Remember: the polls showed Obama leading but under 50 percent. McCain was going to win it if undecideds broke his way. Unless they're lying, they will provide Obama his margin of victory. "We moved the ball forward and everybody know that we did," says Barr campaign guru Stewart Flood.
I talked to Barr foreign policy advisor Doug Bandow, who'd voted for his candidate but was rooting for an Obama "rout." "Obama's foreign policy will be no less aggressive than Bush's, but McCain's will be much worse."
The band at the Barr party plays "Sin City" as a number of Libertarians come over to ask us to ask if we have more detailed numbers. We kind of don't: Between the paucity of stuff that's in and the buggy state sites, we're sort of in a holding pattern.
