ELECTIONEERING CONTINUES IN KNOXVILLE: Meanwhile, Clayton Cramer is reporting unusually long lines in Idaho. Meanwhile, reader Mark Johnson, emailing from a “small rural logging community in western Montana,” reports unusually high turnout there, too: “parking lot jammed with pick-ups and suv’s — unprecedented!” And reader John Earnest, emailing from Birmingham, Alabama, wonders if there’s a trend toward huge turnout in red states:
FWIW, in the population-heavy overwhelmingly Republican Birmingham suburbs (yes, there are ‘burbs here, even city-center regentrification), the turnout is astounding. Radio buzz indicates historic turnout. My own experience was a 10-fold increase in early-morning voters. Other large conservative boxes report more votes in the first hour than in the entire day of the 2000 election. Could be wrong, could be a merely microscopic example. But even anecdotal evidence can occasionally be right, and it’s certainly first. What do readers in other states say?
As you can see, they say the same thing. And these states should all be safe for Bush, I’d think. I don’t know what this means, exactly, except that I guess Bush’s base is motivated.
UPDATE: On the other hand, exit-polling suggests a sudden Bernstein surge in Virginia. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Geraghty says that turnout is up in blue states, too.