Obama Wins North Carolina (With Update)

Sweet:

President-elect Barack Obama has won North Carolina, adding 15 electoral votes to his wide victory and a symbolic triumph in a state that hadn't voted for a Democrat in more than a generation.

The Associated Press declared Obama the winner Thursday after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots.

That survey found there are not enough remaining ballots for Republican candidate John McCain to close a 13,693 vote deficit.

North Carolina's 15 electoral votes brings Obama's total to 364 -- nearly 100 more than necessary to win the White House. Missouri is the only state that remains too close to call.

I must admit, though, that despite the big victory for Democrats on Tuesday, this whole Ted Stevens deal is really bumming me out. But Nate over at fivethirtyeight.com gave me some hope in that regard:

Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call, these include "at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots". * * *

But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.

The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest -- voters told pollsters that they weren't about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem.

And speaking of morons in Alaska, it is beginning to look like Sarah Palin is even a bigger idiot than most of us thought:

Aides to John McCain were shocked by the gaps in the Alaska Governor's knowledge at briefings after she was announced as his running mate, according to Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron.

"She didn't understand, McCain aides told me, that Africa was a continent and not a country and actually asked them if South Africa wasn't just part of the country as opposed to a country in the continent," he said on The O'Reilly Factor programme.

Mrs Palin was also unable to name the countries involved in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was "a major campaign issue", Cameron said.

OK, I can almost understand her lack of knowledge with regard to NAFTA countries, but she didn't know that Africa was a continent? Cameron also reported that Palin "became a nightmare to deal with and started to throw tantrums over negative press."

UPDATE: It looks like Robert Gibbs, the guy taking on Heil Hannity in this clip, will be Obama's Press Secretary. And, with regard to Sarah Palin, it looks like the GOP wants its clothes back (plus check out this must-read New York Times piece on Palin). Finally, there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest amongst publishers to produce George W. Bush's memoirs.