MSNBC just had the gov­er­nor of Penn­syl­va­nia on and he said that because the state Repub­li­can party chose to run some inflam­ma­tory com­mer­cials in the final days about Jere­miah Wright, African Amer­i­can turnout has been off the charts today across the state, east and west. Obama is already look­ing to win the Key­stone State, turn­ing out to be this year’s Ohio ’04 and Florida ’00, by dou­ble digits.

If you’ve been fol­low­ing Nate Silver’s analy­sis on fivethirtyeight.com, you know that McCain’s chances of get­ting to 270 elec­toral votes drops dra­mat­i­cally if he loses Penn­syl­va­nia. He’d essen­tially have to win every state Bush took ver­sus Kerry and Gore, includ­ing Col­orado. And as a Col­oradan, I can pretty much guar­an­tee he’s not get­ting Col­orado. So if McCain loses Penn­syl­va­nia, he’s as good as sunk before the bal­lots west of the Mis­sis­sippi are even counted.

Even though I only need 774 words to stay on pace, I’m not sure I’m going to get it. The elec­tion cov­er­age is going to be pretty much all-​encompassing, unless things wrap up early.

For me, this elec­tion is essen­tially over. I dropped by one the early polling places (two, actu­ally) yes­ter­day and cast my vote for Barack Hus­sein Obama (and Joe Biden, Mark Udall for Colorado’s sen­ate seat and Ed Perl­mut­ter for my con­gres­sional dis­trict). I voted at the sec­ond polling sta­tion because the line at the first one was a good fifty meters long at least, most of that peo­ple two or three abreast. And this is early vot­ing, a full week before elec­tion day.

Turnout is amaz­ing this year. Looks very good for democ­racy. Nor­mally I’d slide into a rant about how the Dems are all about voter turnout and the Repub­li­cans, in the last sev­eral elec­tions, have done every­thing they can to sup­press voter turnout, pre­vent the peo­ple from mak­ing their will known. But I’m in such a good mood, I’ll just give that a pass.