Big Romney Election Day Turnout: 

QStarNews Election Day  Exit Poll: Romney by 5.4 percent in popular vote

"It's a long sort of night... it's a funny thing," Peggy Noonan says. Is she surprised by the strength of Obama tonight? "Yes I am surprise. It's going to take some real thinking about what happened here if what appears to be happening is so."

Much respect to you even if you wish me the opposite,

Sooner or later, we'll all see who the prophet is.

Senator Portman tried to pump up the crowd here in Columbus, but they were having none of it. It's remarkably downbeat here: All eyes are glued to television screens and smart phones, and the aides and staffers aren't saying anything. A few people are sitting glumly on the sofas, and the general mood is pretty tense.

In every presidential election since 1960, the candidate who prevailed in Florida's Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, has also prevailed in Florida. There is no guarantee that the pattern will hold in 2012, but the Tampa region is critical in carrying the Sunshine State (which is why the Republican Party held their national convention there this year). 

More than 80 percent of the vote has been reported in Hillsborough, and President Obama leads Mitt Romney by five percentage points. Mr. Obama, as we have written, is likely getting a push from Florida's fast-growing Hispanic community. In Hillsborough, Hispanic residents have grown by 71 percent since 2000, now accounting for a quarter of the county's population.

McMahon ended her campaign on a note of trickster desperation: Stressing her pro-choice credentials, never mind that she pledged to vote for President Romney's Supreme Court choices; put out a sample Obama-McMahon ballot in which she listed herself as an independent rather than a Republican; clothed supporters in T-shirts that read "I Support Obama and McMahon" that mimicked the shirts of the SEIU, which of course backed Obama and Murphy. She also hired what the New Haven Independent called "a paid army of African-American polls workers" for New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford--never mind that some of them weren't voting for her.

One source of debate this year was the charge that polls "oversampled" Democrats, meaning that they had more voters who identified as Democratic in the surveys than some conservatives expected would actually turn out to vote.

So far, however, Democrats also have an edge in the party identification numbers in the exit polls. In Ohio, 38 percent of voters identified as Democratic in the exit poll as compared with 31 percent of Republicans. And in Virginia, Democrats had a 37-to-33 advantage in party identification. These numbers are similar to what many pre-election polls showed.

CNN is reporting on-air that preliminary exit polls show Latinos represent 10 percent of the voting population, up from 9 percent in 2008.