Missed It By THAT Much

In the words of Maxwell Smart, we "missed it by that much." Last week we gloated over the fact that we had called the electoral and popular vote totals exactly right. It appears that we were one electoral vote off. The final total is Obama 365, McCain 173. We called it Obama 364, McCain 174.

Ok. We know what you're saying. There are no states with one electoral vote. That is true, however, two states split their electoral votes based on Congressional District. Those states are Maine and Nebraska. Maine adopted the split decision law in 1972 and Nebraska followed 24 years later in 1996. Since the change in law, neither state has split its electoral vote.... until now.

Barack Obama had trailed John McCain by 569 votes on Wednesday, but grabbed a 1,260-vote lead in the 2nd Congressional District when early vote totals were added in.

“Today, Nebraska’s 2nd District voters added an Obamaha-shaped exclamation point to Barack Obama’s historic election,” Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) said. “It really is a new day in America when he even picks up an electoral vote in Nebraska.”

The final 5,300 provisional ballots in Douglas County will be considered this week, but those ballots, some of which will be ruled invalid, are not expected to vary much from other Douglas County results favoring Obama. An Obama victory would rack up the first Democratic electoral vote in red-state Nebraska since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson captured the state.

The metropolitan Omaha district is composed of Douglas County and portions of Sarpy County.

Here’s Friday’s unofficial 2nd District count:

• Obama, 134,168.

• McCain, 132,908.