11:39 p.m. - McCain now has a 5,000+ vote lead with 64% reporting. Not sure what to think - there are some rural counties that haven't reported and some others that have only partially reported and are showing a 70-30 margin. But there hasn't yet been one vote tallied from Gallatin County. They will have to go for Obama fairly heavily to offset the rural onslaught. It's possible. Gallatin is usually a moderate county - the students at MSU are more conservative than those here in Missoula at UM. So, I don't know if the youth vote will help. I'm really ready for bed and since the election is a quasi-landslide, I'll stay up for about 10 more minutes and then hit the sack if no new developments occur.

Worst case scenario, McCain wins by 2-3%, compare that to the 20 point margins Bush won in 2000 and 2004 and it's safe to say that Montana is feeling the change of the nation too.

10:47 p.m. - The lead is still decreasing. But one very positive thing is that Gallatin County - home to Bozeman and Montana State University - has yet to report because they had unexpected record turnout so that might bode well. The votes aren't expected to start coming out from Bozeman until after 11 p.m. MST.

Another wonderful result - we are overwhelmingly supporting an expansion of the state's children's health insurance program which should increase the number of children eligible for the program by 30,000 which is a huge number for a state this small. Current results show it passing 70-30%. Who doesn't vote for children's health insurance? Oh, that's right...Bush doesn't.

9:54 p.m. - Yikes....gone down to 3% lead with 35% reporting. It's been amazing to see the rural counties vote being so close after cleaning Kerry's clock in 2004. I'm somewhat skeptical of the final prospects, but I'm already gratified that it will be so close.  

9:35 p.m. - Does anyone care? I mean....it all doesn't really matter now that the unbelievable has happened! It's been a  loooooooong time coming, a long time....but I know a change is gonna come.

Anyway, we have a low number of precincts reporting still and Obama has a lead, 53-44. One worry - the numbers so far have come from the more urban areas, so I'm cautious. It'll just be icing....very thin icing if we can do it. I'm proud of my state anyway for not falling like Wyoming and ND and SD so quickly to the GOP.

I'm just too profoundly amazed to be disappointed by anything else.

8:00 p.m. - NBC declares Montana "too close to call". That's probably the first time I can remember during a presidential race where the networks called our state too close to call immediately after polls closed.  That itself is a victory, suggesting a 2 or 3 point race instead of the usual double digits.

Our Democratic Lite Senator Max Baucus has already been called the winner over the bushy bushy eyebrowed Bob Kelleher.

7:15 p.m. - UPDATE - I'M AN IDIOT! Polls don't close until 8 p.m. MST, so 45 minutes left still. I feel like a complete failure of bloggation.

7:07 p.m. - Polls are closed now. One slightly saddening event - North Dakota (what was considered a battleground by a few) has already been called for McCain. But I'm not taking too much from that, despite the fact that they are our neighbor to the east. We had much different results in our primary than they did - far more for Obama. So...we'll see.

 6:31 p.m. - Polls close in a half hour. Also, I wish I could properly spell the name of the state in which I live.

5:45 p.m. MST - Just got home from a torturously long day of work. My morning voting experience was easy as pie. No wait, but it was very active - most of the booths were filled and there were about twice the number of poll workers as on off years. Turnout in Montana routinely outstrips the national average. 

The one glitch I ran into today reaffirmed my preference for the optical scan voting system. When I got to our US senate race between Democrat (in name only) Max Baucus and Republican Bob Keheller, I ALMOST voted for Baucus, in fact I made a small pencil mark in his circle.  I then remembered the time in his last election when he reminded us how often he "reached across the aisle" and voted with Bush on horrible legislation and I filled in the entire circle for write-in and selected one of my favorite environmental studies professors from the university. Well, when I fed the ballot into the machine, it picked up the scratch under Baucus and said there were two votes for that race and did I want to continue. I picked "no" and covered up my mark for Baucus. 

Like I mentioned before and you may have read, Montana is a swing state and there've been at least two recent polls showing Obama with a within-the-margin-for-error lead. This is exciting. We have almost always been ignored nationally because of our smal electoral vote count and our usually reliable right-Libertarian leanings.

But Montana is far less of a right-wing ideological state than our facsist neighbors Wyoming and Idaho (I keed, they're just nut jobs over there). Our history is a little different in large part because of the city of Butte and Helena in the old copper mining days. Before the big rush to California, Butte was the largest city in the west and was home to thousands and thousands of Irish Catholic miners who organized some of the most radical unions during the labor movement. That history still lingers in both cities - most pronounced in Butte.

Missoula, where I live, has also had progressive streaks. Mike Mansfield (who grew up in Great Falls) went to school at the University of Montana here in Missoula and then later went on to be the longest-serving president of the United States Senate in history (Joe Biden has referenced him as a mentor). Beyond Mansfield's significant presence was a woman who I blogged about earlier, Jeanette Rankin from Missoula. Jeannette was the first woman to be voted to the United States congress and who voted against entry into both World War I and World War II. 

We have a Jeanette Ranking Peace Center here in Missoula which promotes and funds a variety of progressive causes throughout the state. 

 But despite that, Montana still tends to vote Republican in larger numbers on a national level. A lot of this is made up of the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party which makes them slightly more tolerable than your mega rich or your Christian Conservative Republicans.

Case in point. Last weekend, we had a Will the Drywaller in our house working late into Sunday on a house expansion we're doing. At one point, he asked us who we were voting for. I knew he was from the more rural Bitterroot Valley area so I tried to avoid answering, but he pressed and we said Obama. He laughed and said, "Oh, I call him Obama Bin Laden." After picking up my jaw from the floor, he went on to talk about how he can't understand people voting for Republicans either because they only support the rich.

 One thing that I findexciting about our state is that despite the fact that no state has fewer African-Americans than we do, Montana Democrats voted by double-digit margins for Obama in the primary and the fact that he's FAR more competitive this year than 2004 and 2000 Democratic candidates, is something I feel very good about. 

OK, enough prelude....I'll post more when I have something tangible to report.

7:54 a.m. MST - I'm trying to get my kids dressed to go to school, which is also our polling location. I've NEVER had to stand in line to vote before and I'm curious to see if there will be a line. We live in a liberal bubble in Missoula and our neighborhood, in particular, is heavily Democratic.

 Interesting things - we've had Obama ads running on TV here throughout the election. We NEVER had Democratic ads running after the primary season. I've also been personally contacted by an Obama representative at my door at least four times and we had two voting reminders last night. I've frustrated them by telling them I don't want to vote early because I see election day as an event that I want to take my kids to. It's a civic community feeling.

 I will have more later today. We have a major ballot initiaive significantly expanding the SCHIP program here which seems likely to pass overwhelmingly. 

I'm FIRED UP!

I'm READY TO GO!