Watching The Election Returns On Tuesday Night

Need a big swing state called for Romney to keep hope alive.

Heh!

OK, well cool!

Meanwhile, FB exploded a little bit ago with the news that the Ohio senate race has been called for Sherrod Brown. That's big news (and not just because I shook the guy's hand yesterday). Josh Mandel, his opponent, had a ton of outside help and money and was thought to have a real chance at unseating Brown.

In every presidential election since 1960, the candidate who prevailed in Florida’s Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, has also prevailed in Florida. There is no guarantee that the pattern will hold in 2012, but the Tampa region is critical in carrying the Sunshine State (which is why the Republican Party held their national convention there this year).

More than 80 percent of the vote has been reported in Hillsborough, and President Obama leads Mitt Romney by five percentage points. Mr. Obama, as we have written, is likely getting a push from Florida’s fast-growing Hispanic community. In Hillsborough, Hispanic residents have grown by 71 percent since 2000, now accounting for a quarter of the county’s population.

Mr. Obama is also leading in another Florida bellwether, Pinellas County, Hillsborough County’s western neighbor. In Pinellas, 99 percent of the vote has been reported, and Mr. Obama is edging out Mr. Romney 52 percent to 47 percent.

GOP keeps the House, but no real surprise there.

In the final pre-election forecast at FiveThirtyEight, the state of Florida was exceptionally close. Officially, Mr. Obama was projected to win 49.797 percent of the vote there, and Mr. Romney 49.775 percent, a difference of two-hundredths of a percentage point.

The last time a FiveThirtyEight forecast had projected such a close race was in the 2008 senate race in Minnesota, when our final pre-election forecast had given the Democrat, Al Franken, a nominal 0.1-point lead over the Republican incumbent, Norm Coleman. That race ended in a recount, with Mr. Franken winning after several months of ballot counting.