Election Night Part VI

Drudge has declared Bush the winner, Fox has all but done so as well. Fox News and NBC News have both projected a Bush Ohio win — let's hope they are right. Presently, with 91% of precincts reporting, Bush has a 51-49 lead. Overall, it is Bush 249 vs. Kerry 211, by CNN's numbers.

Paul Begala noted that this election will break one long held rule: (1) America doesn't abandon a war time president [if Kerry wins] or (2) America does not reelect presidents with less than a 50% approval rating [if Bush wins]. If (2) is true, it seems to me that perhaps the answer is that the polls have been poor, just as the exit polls have been.

As a side note, Electoral Vote, one of the two major pre-election electoral vote projection sites, is being operated by Andrew Tanenbaum. AST, as he is often known, is best remembered for a major debate in 1992 with Linus Torvalds over microkernels (Minix) vs. monolithic kernels (Linux). AST wrote Minix and has, recently, defended the originality of the GNU/Linux codebase from SCO's attacks.