Election Night News: Obama Wins Pennsylvania and New Hampshire (8:15pm) at “Say Cheese”

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama opened a big lead in the Electoral College in the presidential election Tuesday night as NBC News projected that he had won Pennsylvania, which both parties had targeted as critical to winning the race, along with several other large Eastern and Midwestern states. (Nov. 4, 2008 at 8:15pm)

NBC projected that Obama had also won Massachusetts, New Jersey and his home state of Illinois, three states with hefty electoral vote hauls. He also won Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire and Vermont, the network’s political unit projected.

Obama was also leading in Ohio, another major prize, although NBC News said the results were still too early to call definitively. Republican Sen. John McCain won Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee, while he was leading in Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia in races that were too early or too close to project.

Among other major battleground states, Florida and Indiana were too close to call, while Missouri was too early to call, NBC said. The polls had also closed in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina, where it was too close or too early to make definitive projections.

Results were expected to be delayed across the country as record numbers of voters flocked to polling stations, energized by an election in which they would select either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president.

Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, led in nearly all public opinion polls over McCain, a veteran senator from Arizona. Both campaigns launched get-out-the-vote efforts that led to long lines at polling stations in a contest that Democrats were also hoping would help them expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Americans were voting in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Missouri and Maryland.

Election officials around the country braced for problems, but only minor issues were reported. However, the McCain campaign filed suit in Virginia, home to several major military bases, complaining that absentee ballots were not mailed on time to many members of the military serving overseas.

History played down in favor of issues Voters were being lured to the polls by an election with the potential to make history. Obama, 47, who rocketed to stardom on the power of his oratory and a call for change, could shatter more than 200 years of precedent by becoming the first African-American president in the history of the United States. At the same time, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was in line to become the first woman ever to become vice president.

Both campaigns played down the historic nature of their tickets, preferring to emphasize what they offered as plans to bring sweeping change to Washington and close the door on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, whose approval ratings are near historic lows.

Six in 10 voters picked the economy as the most important issue facing the nation, according to data from national exit polls examined by msnbc.com. Only 9 percent said terrorism was the most important issue.

Pessimism over the economy is usually a grim omen for the party in control of the White House. In the elections of 1992, 1980, 1960 and 1932, economic distress, to some degree, resulted in the party in control losing the White House.

Election experts predicted that as many as 140 million Americans would vote, many of them minority, immigrant and young Americans who were casting ballots for the first time.

Supporters gather for rallies
A crowd expected to top 70,000 began gathering early Tuesday night in Grant Park in Chicago, where Obama scheduled an address at what he hoped would be a victory rally. Hundreds of thousands more — Mayor Richard Daley said he would not be surprised if a million Chicagoans jammed the streets — were expected to watch on a large television screen outside the park.

McCain chose a smaller venue for his celebration, a ballroom in the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. As supporters began filing in, Travis Junion, a staffer for the campaign, said he was glad it was all over.

“I think I’m five Red Bulls in to today, didn’t sleep last night, but this is exciting going into the final stretch,” Junion said. “I was freaking out when we were 100 days out. Now we’re here. It’s definitely surreal.”

Obama and his wife, Michelle, voted with their young daughters at their sides at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School in Hyde Park, Ill. The family was ushered inside ahead of a line of their neighbors that wrapped around the block.

Fellow voters watched in silence and snapped cell-phone pictures. They cheered when Obama held up his validation slip with a smile and said, “I voted.”

“The journey ends, but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal,” he told reporters later.

Obama’s final days of campaigning were bittersweet: He was mourning the loss of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him but died of cancer Sunday night and never got to see the results of the historic election.

In Delaware, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, went to the polls with his elderly mother. Speaking to reporters on his plane, Biden said he had made a deal with his wife, Jill.

“If you get the vice presidency and get elected, you can get a dog,” Biden said his wife told him. “I know what kind I want, [but] I don’t know what kind I’m going to get yet. We’re not there yet. The deal’s not closed yet.”

‘Nothing is inevitable’
McCain, meanwhile, was in Colorado, another usually Republican state where the race was extremely tight.

Telling voters in Colorado Springs to ignore the pundits, McCain insisted that “nothing is inevitable here.”

“I feel the momentum,” McCain told several thousand supporters in an airport hangar: “I feel it, you feel it, and we’re going to win the election.”
McCain cast his ballot early Tuesday at a church near his home in central Phoenix. A small crowd cheered “Go, John, go!” and “We love you!” as he stepped out of a sport utility vehicle with his wife, Cindy. One person carried a sign that read, “Use your brain, vote McCain!”

Palin returned to where her political career began to cast her vote in the snow-dusted, two-story Wasilla City Hall where she once presided as a small-town mayor.
Palin, accompanied by her husband, Todd, voted just after 7 a.m. Tuesday, pushing aside a red, white and blue curtain on a voting booth and handing her white paper ballot to a clerk.

At stake
Democrats seemed poised to expand their majorities in both chambers of Congress, while Republicans battled to limit their losses. NBC News projected as soon as the polls closed in Virginia that Democratic former Gov. Mark Warner had won the state’s open Senate seat, replacing Republican icon John Warner.

The presidential election amounts to separate contests in 50 states and Washington, D.C. At stake are 538 electors, with the winner needing to capture at least 270, half plus one. Electors are apportioned to the states roughly according to population.