Maggie says:
...Nope. Well okay, but only a little bit. :-)
Local races are too personal, too (literally) close to home, too big, too... everything. So instead, I hide in the national races, perfect for my wonky, big-picture sensibilities. Yet as we know, all politics are local, so here are the only things I'll say about in-town races:
- Voting is a breeze. Been getting calls from friends all day who say they were in and out of their polling place in record time. There was so much angst over those long early voting lines, but let's face it: twelve voting locations for an entire city = lines; citywide voting locations = decentralized ease. So go vote! I'll be heading over in an hour or so myself...
- Sorry, Mary. I'd already decided I just couldn't bring myself to vote for Mary Herrera for Secretary of State, and then I saw the Alibi "endorsement" of neither candidate and busted out laughing. I'm leaving that one blank; I just have to. People I care about are confident she'll be a fine Secretary of State, and I know she's from the Valley and all... but as a Bernalillo County voter for the last four years, I'm not exactly confident. Enough said.
- Poor Jim. The Land Commissioner race really disappoints me... and I agree with other local bloggers who say it points to the disconnect folks have between environmentalism and their own lives. This gap will continue to get wider as our environmental problems worsen, and we should all worry about that. Baca v. Lyons represented such a clear choice between philosophies, and I really regret that the majority of New Mexicans seems to be favoring an oil/gas/sprawl man rather than a true advocate for public land.
- Madrid/Wilson. Can't do it, and those of you who know, you know why... It'll be tight, and it'll all depend on turnout, and that's about all I can say right now.
Whew! This is where I'm much more comfortable... I've spent a week doing not much besides obsessing over the latest polls and reading way too much about candidates whose names I'll promptly forget tomorrow, so it's time for tonight to HAPPEN already.
If you're unlucky enough to be on my e-mail distribution list, you already received my exhaustively nerdy House and Senate spreadsheets, where thanks to the goodness of Pollster I've compiled averages of all the latest polls per race along with an outcome category: "Lean Dem," "Toss-up," etc. Going through the numbers race by race, it's hard not to foresee huge Democratic victories tonight... But being realistic, I'm not going to go all-out rosy in my predictions. So here we go:
- House. I'm going to go with 25 pickups. Look through Pollster yourself and you'll see how astronomical some predictions could be, simply based on the lastest polls. But haven't we all been disappointed enough in the past few years by predictions v. outcome? This time I'm choosing to be pleasantly surprised tonight... hopefully. 25 seems reasonable.
- Senate. This will be verrrrry interesting to watch tonight. My prediction is picking up 5 seats, but I can't break that number down at all. Race-by-race I've chosen six pickups, the magic number. Yet I know one of them will fall, one of them will be the "should have won" race that just won't be able to pull it off in the end. Which, I don't know. But I love McCaskill's spunk and Jon Tester makes me want to move to Montana just to vote for him, so how could I predict one of them going down? I've lost hope for Ford in Tennessee, but I'm still predicting Dem wins in Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia. I could see Rhode Island falling, maybe... Not sure, but one of them likely will, and we'll get five. And that's not a number to be ashamed of.
It's going to be a long night... but a fun one, I hope.
I want to wake up tomorrow and SMILE... don't you?
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