Christmas for politicos, and I'm an elf

My longest day begins, and I begin it in better spirits about the work ahead (if not neccessarily the outcome) than I have in ages. As most readers know, I lead a double life as activist and worker, and today the needle is buried deep in the red of the worker side.

Election Day itself is actually quieter in the office itself than the day before, because there aren't people voting. We had 693 voters pass through yesterday, putting our final absentee request count to 30,224. Here's a graph comparing that to past years:





Danger Will Robinson: still 4210 ballots not returned. Do not mail a ballot today! Turn it in at the office OR bring it to the polls, turn it in in voted, and vote there. If you lost it you can vote a provisional ballot, which almost certainly gets counted.

I'll spend most of the day on the phone giving people directions. I'm also watching the turnout closely to see if my predictions from three months ago - 51,903 voters counting the early vote - hold, or if we need to send more ballots and workers out.

At 9 PM, I'll be working on election returns.


For civilians, Daily Kos has made some projections of the kinds of numbers Democrats need om order to win Iowa:

County	% of 2012 statewide vote	What we need to break 50% statewide	2012 Pres.
Statewide	100.0	50/48	52/46
Polk	14.5	54/44	56/42
Linn	7.5	56/42	58/40
Scott	5.7	54/44	56/42
Johnson	4.8	65/33	67/31
Black Hawk	4.2	57/41	59/39
Dubuque	3.2	55/44	57/42
Story	3.0	54/44	56/42
Woodbury	2.8	48/51	50/49
Pottawatomie	2.7	44/54	46/52
Dallas	2.4	41/57	43/55

If all goes well, I may catch the tail end of the Democrats' victory party (no matter how poor the prospects it's ALWAYS called a victory party) at the Mill. Then I get home, write a first draft of crunching numbers, and go back to work tomorrow on too little sleep. The day AFTER feels longer than the day OF.