10:43PM: With 346 precincts reporting, Carson has this locked. The Indianapolis Star and other media outlets are calling this race for Carson.
10:35PM (James): With 327 of 445 precincts reporting, it’s not looking good for El Rod: 53-44 Carson.
9:46PM (David): This site might be updating quickest of all. 51-47 Carson with 232 of 445 precincts reporting. My sheet now shows Elrod would need over 54% of the outstanding vote to pull ahead.
9:33PM (James): 50-47 Carson with 51% in.
8:43PM (David): 51-46 Carson with 27% in. My spreadsheet indicates, that at least as far as the two-party vote goes, Elrod would have to perform 10% better than he is now in the remaining precincts to overtake Carson.
8:23PM: Carson 52%, Elrod 45%, with 26% of precincts reporting.
8:12PM: With 18% of precincts in, Carson is up 51%-46%.
7:46PM ET: With 13% of precincts reporting, Carson now has a 50%-47% lead.
7:37PM ET (J. Hell): With 6% of precincts reporting, Elrod has a 51%-46% lead over Carson. The commenters over at Blue Indiana caution that GOP-friendly precincts tend to report first.
UPDATE: WISH-TV has results. Also available on the front page at Indy Star.
Right now, as SSP readers know, a special election is taking place in Indiana’s 7th Congressional District to replace the late Julia Carson. The Democrat is her grandson, Indianapolis councilman Andrew Carson, and the Republican is state Rep. Jon Elrod.
Polls close ridiculously early here – 6pm Eastern. I personally think this is an affront to working people and should be changed. But we can have a long conversation about voting reform another time. For now, please post your predictions in comments. Then, we’ll turn this over to results once they start streaming in.
I suspect the Indy Star will carry results here. Also, I’m sure that our friends at Blue Indiana will be all over this sucker. Let’s just hope we pull this one off.
…where we lost this race by 6 points.
But I have a lot of crazy dreams.
I just voted in my heavily Democratic downtown neighborhood. Turnout looked light (as to be expected for a special election), but not as light as might be expected. My gut feeling is that Andre pulls it out by a few points. He’s run the more active and visible campaign, and I get the sense that at least some of the intra-party bad feelings are being put aside, at least for today. But nothing will suprise me, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
The lead it up to 7 points now at 52% to 45%. Good news.
In 2006, voters in IN-7 cast 139,000 votes; in 2004 it was 223,000. This looks to be closer to 50,000 votes. This will be a shoe-in in November but we may have to sweat things out tonight.
Congrats and very best wishes to my new Congressman, Andre Carson. He proved a lot of skeptical people (myself included) wrong, and hung up an impressive margin of victory last night. Among other things, he becomes only the second Muslim member of Congress — I really wasn’t sure that Indiana was ready for that, and particularly on this score, I’m glad to be proven wrong.
This special election showed the power of money — Carson had enough of it, and the Republicans didn’t have any. If the GOP had half a million to throw into this race, or had a self-funding candidate, the results might have been different. That, and Andre Carson did a pretty good job of presenting himself to the district. Also important was an endorsement ad done by Senator Evan Bayh — yeah, I know a lot of liberals don’t like him, but he remains incredibly popular with more moderate Democrats and Independents, and there is no question that he helped here.
So we go on to a crowded primary in May, and Democrats here like myself have a decision to make. I said a month or so back that if Carson won this special election by a wide margin, he should probably be our party nominee in the fall — and I am leaning towards sticking to that, although there are a couple of other candidates who would make potentially great members of Congress. On a national level, the good news is that you can take this race off of the ones to worry about!!!
On a side note, me and a lot of other Democrats here are in the strange position of not only having our primary votes for President matter, but they might matter more than anyone’s!! I guess that means I need to get off the Obama/Clinton fence and pick one!
apparently have an issue with spelling.
you say potato, I say potato, Indiana says potatoe?