Obama Victory Speech - VIDEO, TEXT.

This is what it all comes down to. Election day.

Don’t expect many updates from the DS team tomorrow as we’ll all be out in the field, canvassing, driving, and getting out the vote in Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. We’ll see who can win a state, and who can’t. Or maybe we all will.

In the meantime, we’ll be checking these sites for updates throughout the day:

• Real Time Election Results via Google Maps
• Talking Points Memo
• OpenLeft
• Ben Smith
• FiveThirtyEight.com

Here’s a list of poll closing times:

Barack Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died of cancer this morning in Hawaii. She was 86.

She raised quite a grandson. Let’s all go out there tomorrow and win one for Toot.

Unless The Onion has bought The Washington Post, this is actually a real quote:

Palin said if she and husband Todd had had a sixth child, they had already picked a name for a boy joining siblings Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig.

“I always wanted a son named Zamboni,” she said.

She also calls herself an intellectual in the article. No word yet if she knows the definition of the word.

(h/t tmrly)

Remember $400 haircuts? Let’s start doing some multiplication. First, Politico reports:

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

Despite the obvious hypocrisy of an average hockey mom spending $150 grand on clothing in the midst of an economic crisis, Huffington Post points out some harder numbers:

Palin’s fashion budget for several weeks was more than four times the median salary of an American plumber ($37,514). To put it another way: Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.

And even those few Republicans who still have principles aren’t happy about this as Ambinder points out that $150,000 is “one good week of television time in Colorado.” Off the record Republicans are supposedly “utter[ly] disgusted.”

Yet somehow, we still live in a Conservative America. November 5th is going to be an interesting day.

For our Bay Area friends looking for entertainment for tonight’s debate. No word yet whether they will have another TV with the Phillies game on.

In case you hadn’t already heard: Hungry for Obama is hosting a BBQ and debate viewing (on a 63-inch TV with speakers) in Dolores Park (San Francisco) tonight. The BBQ will start at 5 pm; the debate is from 6-7:30. It should be a lot of fun — we had nearly 100 people last week for the second debate. If we’re lucky, there’ll even be some post-debate slacklining.

Come find us at the southern end of the park near the playground.

We’ll have a laptop on hand so that everyone can use their credit cards to make contributions to the Obama campaign. ($20 minimum, please.) If you have a laptop and wireless modem and you’d be willing to bring them so that we can have more than one Internet connection available, we’d be extremely grateful.

The food will be free, with small contributions welcome from those so inclined.

See you there!

Hungry For Obama has been organizing dinner party fundraisers for the Obama campaign over the last month, raising over $36,000 in that time.

I’m sure little Sarah McCain won’t ever be mad at her father for this one…

ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. — A new father has secretly named his baby girl Sarah McCain Palin after the Republican ticket for president and vice president.

Mark Ciptak of Elizabethton put that name on the documents for the girl’s birth certificate, ignoring the name Ava Grace, which he and his wife had picked earlier.

“I don’t think she believes me yet,” he told the Kingsport Times-News for a story to be published Tuesday. “It’s going to take some more convincing.”

Added Ciptak, “I took one for the cause.”

From FOXNews via Ambinder.

If you’re not already a regular reader of Nate Silver’s election analysis over at FiveThirtyEight.com then you’re truly missing out. Silver is best known for creating the modern baseball statistic of PECOTA, a system for forecasting future player performance. This year he’s turned his talent towards electoral forecasting and today he’s got some analysis of the state of play in Georgia. He believes that Obama is already ahead in Georgia based on early voting.

Perhaps the only happy consequence of the segregation era is that a number of Southern states like Georgia are required by the Voting Rights Act to keep statistics on registration and turnout by the race of the voter. Those statistics suggest that black voter registration is up materially from 2004.

Here are the numbers. In November 2004, black voters represented 27.4 percent of Georgia’s active registered voter pool. As of October 1st, that figure has increased to 29.0 percent.

…

So suppose that by tonight, black voters have increased to 30 percent of Georgia’s registered voter pool. Plugging that 30 percent number in, McCain’s advantage is a mere 1 point.

Think these numbers sound unreasonable? Early voting is underway in Georgia, and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, black voters do not represent 30 percent of Georgia’s early voter turnout. Instead, they represent almost 40 percent. Although early voting figures can be idiosyncratic, Barack Obama certainly seems to be having little trouble getting his vote out. Indeed, Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now.