So, why are we here?

Monday Evening, 21:30
Greetings from Yokohama, Japan. Hope all of you are doing well. Capping a two year marathon campaign season, returns from the US Election will start coming in about 36 hours from now, and the Tatami Pundit team will be posting results as they come in, live from the Baron in Roppongi, central Tokyo. The fun starts at 9am, Wednesday morning, Japan time. Live comments, opinion and news (probably in that order) will be posted at a frantic pace.

The US Presidential race will be our main course, but we will be watching select Senate races (especially those in North Carolina, Kentucky and Minnesota).

For the uninitiated, the US presidential contest is all about the Electoral College. Popular vote is counted, yes, but it only goes toward the Electoral College. The Electoral College then actually makes the direct vote for president. Thus, Americans are, technically, voting for these Electors, not for president directly.

Each state gets a number of votes which is equal to the size of its delegation in Congress. Congressional delegations are the sum of the number of representatives a state has in the House of Represetatives, plus the two members each state has in the Senate. Take Ohio, for instance. Ohio has 18 members in the House, and two Senate members, giving it 20 electoral votes. Some states have huge electoral values, such as California (55), Texas (34) and New York (31), and others have much smaller worth, such as Alaska (3), Nevada (5), and Oklahoma (7). The goal of this exercise is to get a majority of Electoral Votes. The magic number is 270. Get that or over, and you're president. Simple, eh? Oh, by the way, although it has never happened, it is mathematically possible for an electoral tie to occur. A 269-269 vote would then go to the Senate.

So, with this wonderful, wild, wacky system, is it possible (and indeed, it has happened twice so far in US history), for a candidate to win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college and, therefore, the presidency.

Where do the candidates stand now? Well, numbers vary, but MSNBC and most other news outlets have already called the race for Obama. The pre-election day electoral count, as counted by various polling aggregators and news agencies are:

MSNBC: 286-157, Obama; 95 toss-up
CNN: 291-157, Obama; 90 toss-up (http://edition.cnn.com/POLITICS/)
Electoral Vote: 353-185, Obama; No toss-ups
538.com: 340.2-198.8, Obama; No toss-ups
CBSNews: Gives Obama a +13 edge, but no map available.
Fox News, perhaps sensing impending doom on the Republican side, has their map completely blank on this election eve, but there is a section on the front page linking teen pregnancy to sexy TV.

I know, I know..."Oh, like so what? Another amatuer blog on Election Night!"
That's what you're thinking, right? Right, but I have the advantage of watching this from 8,000 miles away.
To me, elections are like catnip. I live for election return nights, and that I live in Japan just means I have to do this on a Wednesday morning instead of a Tuesday evening. I have the same problem with the Super Bowl - our local fiestas for the game always start around 8am Monday morning.
We will blog through the day and the language and tone will no doubt get salty. But, this is supposed to be satire and political wit, mixed with no small quantity of late-morning beer. The point is to be informative and irreverant/entertaining. Oh, and, on a personal note - yeah, I'm very partisan. I'm not a paid journalist, so there won't be a lot of objectivity here. I'm pulling for Obama in a big way. I have had enough of meeting someone and, when the invetible question on national origin comes up, having to qualify my nationality..."I'm from the USA, but I didn't vote for George Bush..."

See you guys in about 36...