Joe Biden is dominating a new Democratic primary poll in South Carolina from the Post and Courier and Change Research.

PRESIDENT – SOUTH CAROLINA – DEM PRIMARY (Change Research)
Joe Biden 46%
Bernie Sanders 15%
Kamala Harris 10%
Pete Buttigieg 8%
Elizabeth Warren 8%
Cory Booker 4%
Beto O’Rourke 2%
Andrew Yang 2%
Stacey Abrams 1%
Amy Klobuchar 1%
Marianne Williamson 1%
Michael Bennet 0%
Julián Castro 0%
John Delaney 0%
Tulsi Gabbard 0%
Kirsten Gillibrand 0%
John Hickenlooper 0%
Jay Inslee 0%
Tim Ryan 0%
Eric Swalwell 0%

This poll was done May 6-9 among 595 likely primary voters.

Not much to say today that hasn’t been said elsewhere.

One thing that is interesting to note (or at least I find interesting) is when President Bush officially handed power over to Barack Obama this afternoon, it became only the third time in American history when back-to-back Presidents managed to serve two consecutive complete four-year terms. The first two times occurred when James Madison followed Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe in turn followed James Madison back between the years of 1801 and 1825

Since then, there has not been an instance where two consecutive Presidents managed to complete two complete four-year terms until Bill Clinton and George W. Bush just did. Everytime a President managed to serve two full terms, the following President either lost re-election, chose to not for re-election, or died in office.

The only Presidents out of the 43 men to hold the office to serve two consecutive full four-year terms were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush. Grover Cleveland, of course, served two non-consecutive terms.

First of all, the only thing I will say about the Ravens’ game last night is Orioles’ pitchers and catchers report February 15th and the Capitals’ will soon be making their Stanley Cup run in April….

Now I am not a sudden Obama supporter, but being close to DC and having some time to kill before the game last night, we decided to head down for the free Inauguration Concert in DC. I couldn’t miss the chance to be a part of the atmosphere or history, even if I don’t support our next President. The crowd was packed in by the time the concert started. Here was a shot back at the crowd on the lawn of the Washington Monument.

The concert started off with Denzel Washington before the first song by Bruce Springsteen.

We were located about half way down the left side of the Reflecting Pool right along the fence line. We really could not see anything happening on the stage, mostly due to the fact that there was a big jumbotron at the end of the Reflecting Pool blocking anything happening on stage. I won’t bore you with pictures of every singer since they all pretty much are just pictures of the jumbotron we saw from our vantage point. Here, Steve Carell is yapping, is how we watched most of the concert.

Of course the highlight for the others in crowd was Barack Obama.

And the current occupant of the White House did buzz by the event.

One thing that I can’t complain about is they did prepare well enough for the attendees to…well…relieve themselves.

Not sure if they will have enough for the events on Tuesday, but there were plenty for yesterday’s concert. And in case you wondered how cold it really was, the seagulls were probably wondering why they were able to walk on water (in this case the Reflecting Pool).

The concert itself was a lot more subdued than I would have expected. Other than Garth Brooks who played to the crowd and got people dancing, the rest of the music acts were mellow and barely caused a ripple in the crowd, at least among those around me. We took off right after the Obama speech and missed the last few songs in order to beat the crowds to the Metro. I will say getting in and out of the event was a lot easier than I expected and I made it back for that debacle in Pittsburgh….

Well you knew it would not take long for the new bumper stickers to come out. Last night at are rather well attended Howard County Republican Club First Friday Happy Hour. I heard that these were already being produced by our locally owned McCain Shop for those McCain supporters upset about Tuesday night’s results.

Say you weren’t a McCain supporter in the General election, but are not happy about the results, you could have this one.

Then there is my favorite, a sticker for die-hard Republicans who while supporting McCain in the General election as the lesser of two evils, wants to send a message to all the other Republicans who supported McCain in the primary.

You can buy them all at the McCain Shop website here (a little free advertising for our local store). Anyway, just a little humor on this lovely Saturday morning….

Well that’s that….

I was resigned to McCain losing a while ago, so the fact that he lost really didn’t phase me much last night as it did in 2006, when I took the election much harder. That was more because we lost a lot of races where I was emotionally attached to the candidates I supported. I never really had much emotional connection to John McCain even after he was chosen as the GOP nominee. Anyone around here back during the primary knows my enthusiasm for any of the GOP candidates was low and never really could decide who I really wanted. This is unlike 2000 when I was a Bush supporter from the day he announced to the day he was elected and rode every up and down in the polls emotionally. This year, the whole election was more of a “sporting event” for me than anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I gladly voted for McCain yesterday and wanted him to win and had no intention of voting for Obama, but it was truly more of a party vote than voting for the individual candidate. One thing I did learn long ago is it really doesn’t matter who the President is as far as my personal life goes. I was better off personally after the eight years of Bill Clinton and I was better off personally after the almost eight years of George W Bush. I am sure I will be even better off after a term (hopefully only one) of Barack Obama. I’ve been part of winning campaigns (1994, 200, 2002, 2004) and part of losing ones (1996, 2006, 2008) and life goes on whether my side won or lost….

This was a fascinating election to watch and despite the outcome, had a lot of fun covering it and participating in it. This site, I hope, helped you enjoy it as well and I’m not going anywhere. I might take some time to decompress and the posting may become a little lighter over the next couple of months, but I still have a lot of fun doing this site and have no intention of stopping or slowing down too much to make the site irrelevant. In the words of Rush Limbaugh – “I am still having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.”

One side note from last night, this site hit 43,688 unique site visits and an all-time single-day record of 98,681 page views throughout the course of the day. And at some point during the afternoon, this site passed 3,000,000 unique site vists in the history of the site. Obviously traffic is going to nosedive like it does after every other election, but just a little bit of navel-gazing if you allow me….

Anyway, now that things have wrapped up and we have time to breathe again, my first item I want to get to is to analyze all the pollsters and how they performed this year. We had a number of new pollsters who polled numerous states this year that we can get a good idea of which pollsters know what they are doing and which ones clearly don’t. Also, we can already start looking ahead to the 2010 mid-terms (as well as the 2009 races in VA and NJ) and what seats are up all across the country. Could we have another 1994 on our hands or will the Democrats be able to keep their gains they have gotten in the past two election cycles? Only time will tell and I plan on being here to tell part of it….

Since the national election is pretty much a foregone conclusion, everyone here is focusing on the local and state elections. Mainly, the US Congressional race in District 1 and our local County School Board race.

So leads to the question – What the hell in wrong with the Maryland Election system that it takes this long to report results? It has now been almost three hours since the polls closed in this state and they are still only at 37% of precincts reported. In Howard County, it is even worse as only 16 out of 110 precincts have officially reported. What is so difficult about getting the votes out of these electronic machines? This is absolutely absurd….

Anyway, just venting at this point….

Well the polls finally have closed in my home state of Maryland. It will be called for Obama pretty quickly, but i am more interested in seeing what happens with the slots legalization amendment.

Right now McCain leads 77-28 in the Electoral College with states called at 8pm….

Closing in thirty minutes are polls in Ohio, North Carolina and West Virginia. Official results for Ohio can be found here. Official results for North Carolina can be found here.

So far, Kentucky has been called for McCain and Vermont has been called for Obama. McCain is ahead 8-3 – YAY!

Welcome to The Hedgehog Report live from the Howard County Republican Headquarters in Fulton, MD. Obviously everyone is here for results and hopefully I will be able to chime in where and when I can. rdelbov will also be online posting, as he has been doing all day. We will both try to keep up with things. After this post, things on the site are sort of just going to happen on the fly, so I don’t know what to expect from this point on….

Some polls in Indiana and Kentucky closed at 6pm EST, but the full states aren’t done until 7:00pm when we also have the polls closing in Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina and Vermont. I believe these are the results pages from the official state Government websites, but don’t hold me to it (I’ll update them if they changed):

Georgia
Indiana
Kentucky
Virginia
South Carolina
Vermont

Obviously these results will also be constantly updated elsewhere online as well as on TV. But here is as good a place to start as any others to get fuller breakdowns in each state as the results come in.

After these states close, Ohio and West Virginia will be closing at 7:30pm.