I’m still wondering what the hell happened down there–everything should have gone Kerry’s way there, with overall turnout and minority turnout working for Kerry to what should have been a strong degree. I suspect that there will be some very close looking-into of the electronic voting machines, but for the time being, Florida is in Bush’s column.

So that makes Bush and Kerry tied in the Three Big Ones, and makes things much darker for the Democrats–but Ohio is still in play, and despite Bush’s current razor-thin lead at present, missing Democratic districts could put the state into Kerry’s column. Kerry, however, will have to pull what James Carville called “an inside straight”–in other words, he has to win the north midwest, including Michigan, Minnesota (both very likely to go his way), Wisconsin, Iowa (leaning for Kerry now, but still too close for comfort), and, of course, Ohio. With 76% of precincts reporting, Bush maintains a 51% lead, with Kerry at 48% or 49%, depending on who you listen to. Predictably, if Ohio goes to Kerry by a small margin, Republicans will explode in a frenzy of fraud claims and legal challenges.

CNN just called Colorado and Montana for Bush, while Oregon has been called for Kerry on C-SPAN (which still has the best web page electoral map, by the way).

This is post #999 on this blog, by the way–I was hoping to reserve #1000 for a declaration of Kerry’s win, but it looks like I might go over the landmark before we can say either way. Nevertheless, I may simply add updates to this post unless it looks like this will go on a lot longer than just a few hours.

UPDATE 9:44 PM PST: Fox, of all networks, calls New Hampshire for Kerry, and Minnesota has been called for Kerry as well, but neither have settled into the maps by the bigs yet. Washington just predictably went for Kerry. However, it looks like Thune may have won over Daschle in South Dakota–but it seems pretty close still, as it’s within 1,000 votes, and from what is being reported on Political Animal, the Indian reservation votes–strongly for Daschle–have not been added to the tallies yet.

UPDATE 9:50 PM PST: Fox, echoing their scandalous Florida declaration four years ago, has called Ohio for Bush, and is more or less declaring Bush president again. Hopefully, the rest of the media will restrain themselves from slavishly following their lead–though spin, at this point, is pretty much moot. All that’s left to do is count.

We should also remember that a huge number of absentee and provisional ballots remain uncounted in both Florida and Ohio, and Ohio will not even count the provisionals for eleven days. Yikes. I am not going to give up hope, not by a long shot. But still, things are not exactly conducive to hope at the moment.

UPDATE 10:10 PM PST: Ohio is not out of the running for Kerry, folks–Bush had a 130,000 vote lead in Ohio with 84% of the precincts counted, but when 87% of the precincts were reported, Bush’s lead fell to 100,000 votes. This indicates that the Kerry-heavy urban areas can blow that Bush lead away as the final numbers tally up. But then there are still about 125,000 provisional ballots, which may not be counted until November 15th.