William Kristol: "It may be a little early to say Virginia is too close to call"

Kristol wonders whether VA is legitimately contested or if it's just some problem with the exit pollers getting their data together. He says, though, that if we still can't project VA by 8, it might be bad news for Bush nationally.

I don't know if I agree. For one thing, my good friend Hoke Malokey warned us that VA was more in play than assumed -- Northern Virginia is notoriously liberal.

For another, VA looked somewhat in play a few weeks ago, too.

And lastly-- think of it like this. Bush has only so many voters. He's not going to get much more than 50% of the vote nationally. Given that upper boundary, wouldn't you rather that more of his pool of voters turned out to be in, say, Ohio, rather than being wasted in southern states on big margins of victory?

Yeah, you're thinking that's goofy. But think about it. It makes sense.

Just like a football team would rather score 30 points a game than, say, 480 points in one game and zero in all others.