While no swing states have been called, voting has wrapped up in five of them and – surprise! – they’re close. As the county maps color out in red and blue, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire remain, proverbially, too close to call.
According to network projections, Mitt Romney has taken South Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Kansas, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and at least three of Nebraska's five electoral votes. President Obama nabbed Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland, Illinois, and the District of Columbia.
The 8 p.m. poll-closings occurred on largely friendly turf for Obama. The 9 p.m. wave, which included Colorado and Wisconsin, contained more safely red states (seven) than blue (three).
In almighty Ohio, according to exit polls, Obama is pulling 42 percent of white voters, a tick down from his 2008 performance there. That’s heartening news for fans of Obama, whose greatest electoral weakness has always been the blue-collar white voters the Buckeye State produces in droves; the largest bloc of exit-poll respondents there reported income below $50,000.
And the raw arithmetic behind the Obama campaign’s fierce pushing of the auto-industry bailout found some Election Night redemption: According to the exits, 56 percent of Ohio votes approved of the bailout, and the group backed Obama over Romney by a split of 75 percent to 24 percent.
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