FiveThirtyEight.com has an interesting post comparing the 2008 electoral map with the 1992 electoral map. Which states voted more Democratic last week as compared with when Clinton won his first term? Which states voted more Republican?
Basically the Republicans have made notable gains in the western Appalachian states, the Mid-South, the southern plains, and the mountain west. Meanwhile, the Democrats have solidified their hold on the Northeast, while making gains in the Midwest, Pacific coast, and southern Rocky Mountains.
The summary:

Essentially, by sacrificing 50 or so Electoral Votes from the inland South, the Democrats have taken about 60 votes from former swing states and turned them into Lean Democratic states, and another 44 or so from former lean Republican states and turned them into swing states. This is a good trade-off.

See the post for a map and full Electoral College breakdown.

A belated congratulations to Preident-elect Obama, who ran one of the best campaign operations I have seen.
Obama’s election is obviously noteworthy because he is the first African-American candidate to win. The 2008 campaign stretched out for so long, with Obama the front-runner much of the time, that on one level I had already adjusted to the idea of having an African-American president.
Still, as I watched him speak at Grant Park, I stepped back and tried to view the scene as I would have seen it just ten years ago. And in that light, it’s totally unexpected. I imagined I might see a black president at some point during my lifetime. But given the dearth of black governors and senators at the time, it seemed unlikely that it would be anytime soon.
Looking forward, Obama is inheriting one of the biggest challenges an incoming president has faced since the Vietnam War. On the international front, he faces armed conflict on two fronts and simmering issues with several rogue states. But by far his biggest problem is the tanking world economy (bonddad has a series of graphs illustrating the situation here). This will dominate his first year in office . . . and likely well beyond that.
I hope President Obama is able to run the government as well as he ran his campaign. We’re going to need it.

Because I can make guesses, like everyone else.
President: Obama 353 McCain 185
Obama wins Kerry states + NV, NM, CO, IA, OH, VA, NC, FL
My toughest call was NC and MO. They appear to be close enough that both could go either way. I picked one for Obama; one for McCain. I could have flipped a coin, but awarded NC to Obama on the basis of NC’s early voting turnout.
Senate: 57(D) 40(R) 2(I) (GA runoff)
House: 263(D) 172(R)
Reports of high voter turnout presumably favor Democratic candidates. The issue is whether young and sporadic/first-time voters show up. If they do, we should see a Democratic wave tonight. If not, we may have a late night as overwhelmed election workers sort through the mess.
NOV. 5 AM UPDATE: The predictions were fairly on target. As expected, MO and NC were incredibly close. McCain is the apparent winner in MO. Obama has a slight lead in NC with “100%” of the precincts reporting, but no big media have awarded it yet.
With NC and MO tentatively outstanding, the only state I missed was IN, which itself was so close it took at least seven hours to sort out.
It’s still too early to tell how the Senate may shake out, but I could potentially miss three races. A runoff has not yet been called in GA. Franken trails in MN, with a recount pending. And Merkley trails in OR, with the vote count ongoing.
House races are still being counted, but right now the Democrats are apparently two or three seats short of my projection.

This is a random musing; I don’t have hard data to back it up. But I’m curious why the TV pundits have offered relatively little discussion on Hispanic voters this election cycle.
I recall quite a bit of conversation about the group in 2004. Who was doing better winning Hispanic-American voters: George Bush or John Kerry? It even loomed fairly large in the 2006 election. Immigration policy was certainly a hot topic, as many conservatives played up the immigration “crisis.”
Yet this year I’ve heard very little on both fronts. I don’t understand why. Did the growing Latino bloc vanish? Have all the illegal immigrants return home?
Off the top of my head, I can only come up with two possible reasons why this facet of the election has been downplayed:
(1) Last year Senator McCain maintained a more “liberal” stance on comprehensive immigration reform–much closer to that of Senator Obama’s than the position held by many Republicans. This, to some degree, has taken the issue off the table.
It’s worth noting that President Bush also has had a relatively liberal immigration position, yet that did not stop Republicans from making hay out of the issue in 2004 and 2006.
(2) The souring U.S. economy may have reduced the influx of migrant workers. Construction and service-sector jobs have been drying up, thanks to the recession. The economic magnet is much weaker than it used to be. As the flow of migrants has decreased, the issue has receded from the headlines:

Data released in September by the Census Bureau showed that overall immigration slowed dramatically in 2007, though the bureau does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.
. . .
The Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that supports tighter controls on immigration, has estimated that the number of undocumented immigrants in the country has declined by 11 percent, or 1.3 million, since August 2007. As of May, the estimated illegal immigrant population in the United States was 11.2 million.

Whatever the reason, the disappearing national discourse on Hispanic politics remains mysterious to me.

The latest McCain campaign theme is to paint Obama as a candidate bent on turning America into a “socialistic” nation. As David Corn pointed out on Hardball last week, Governor Palin is a particularly strange messenger to bring this charge against Obama:

The funny thing about using the word socialism in this context, who is the most socialistic governor in the United States? That would be Sarah Palin. Alaska survives fiscally because what it does is it taxes the oil companies and then sends a check out to every citizen of Alaska, because the argument is-and actually, I like this argument-the citizens of the state own the wealth, the natural resources of the state collectively, and they all should get a payment back when those resources are exploited by the big bad oil companies. If that’s not some form of socialism, I don’t know what is.

Hendrik Hertzberg adds details:

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist–Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine–that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

McCain and Palin like to point out Palin’s high approval ratings in Alaska and that she has supposedly cut taxes while balancing the budget. What TV analysts covering the race generally fail to point out is that her stint as governor has coincided (until recently) with a huge spike in oil prices. Consequently, oil royalty payments to the state have soared.
Given the recent crash of oil prices, it will be interesting to see how popular Palin remains if she has to start slashing government services, instead of merely doling out a windfall. At any rate, it would be informative if some enterprising reporter would press either McCain or Palin on his or her philosophical view of Alaska’s “socialism.”