Halter pulled ahead briefly, but is back to trailing narrowly.
68.5 reporting
Lincoln 43.6
Halter 42.8
Morrison 13.7
Lincoln will likely get the narrow victory, but it doesn't matter either way because this thing is going to a runoff, and the results were MUCH tighter than anyone expected. Look at the polling aggregate:
That means the undecided vote broke HEAVILY for Halter, as is usually the case -- undecideds generally break for the challenger, which is why an incumbent under 50 percent is generally in danger. Our own R2K polling was the closest to the mark, showing a 43-35 Lincoln lead.
So Halter is overperforming the polls by 11 points. Pretty damn impressive. And here's another good sign for the runoff: Bill Halter leads Blanche Lincoln in 10 of the 13 counties where Morrison got 20% or more of the vote.
So check those trendlines above. They will only accelerate in the lower-turnout runoff. Blanche is toast.
Update: Josh Marshall:
Lincoln is speaking right now. And I must say, she's got the sound of a loser in this speech. She seems kind of shell-shocked. She started off saying that she'd been written off and now is back. But I mean, that's not true. The consensus was that she'd win tonight with a good margin and quite possibly win outright and avoid a run-off. Now she's got a real fight on her hands.
Written off by who? Sounds like this idiocy by Adam Nagourney:
Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas faced an uphill battle against the popular lieutenant governor, Bill Halter. Neither reached the 50-percentage threshold, so they’ll got to a runoff on June 8.
Uphill battle? In what world? She had the Arkansas machine, she had Obama cutting ads for her, she had Bill Clinton cutting ads for her, she had the Chamber of Commerce and its pals, she had three times the cash Halter did, she had decades of incumbency (in the Senate and House), she had a powerful committee chairmanship in the Senate... Need I go on?
Update II: Halter was expected to win Pulaski County, instead Lincoln won it easily. Looks like saturation anti-Halter ads in Little Rock had an effect. Fortunately for him, he ran much stronger in the rest of the state than expected, more than making up for the Little Rock setback. However, had the Chamber of Commerce and its buddies not gone balls-to-the-wall for Blanche, she would've suffered the indignity of losing tonight's plurality. So she owes those nefarious corporate interests that much more of a debt.
Update III: I just heard from Adam Nagourney that the idiocy attributed to him wasn't actually written by him, that the NY Times somehow screwed up the bylines. The byline has been updated to a generic "New York Times". I'd be pretty pissed about that if I were Nagourney.