His town hall is streaming on CNN.com.  He's about to go into details about it now.

Comments are below the fold, but you can watch it yourself.

    Senator Obama is coming to South Dakota tomorrow, I know hard to believe, South Dakota! I will get to hear Senator Obama speak in Watertown, South Dakota at a Town Hall Mtg on Rural Issues. I can't really give anymore details about the event, other than the seating was limited and I had to go on a very trecherous search for tickets!  My question for all of you is, if given a chance what question should I ask Senator Obama?

    For any of you in South Dakota, I will remind you that the Senator will be holding a rally at the Sioux Falls Arena in Sioux Falls, SD tomorrow night. Doors open at 5pm with event starting at 7pm. I believe that I might also make the drive to that rally for the sake of history.

   So, again, to the question of what I should ask the Senator...if you have any ideas, I'd appreciate your input. Hopefully I'll get some pictures and handshake, which could lead me back here for a follow-up.

Okay, this is my first diary, and even though I read the rules, so I apologize in advance for any and all inadvertent rule-breaking, typos, grammatical errors and other gaffes.  

Now to the substance.

I read Hillary Clinton's West Virginia victory speech with interest and, like many, was particularly struck by the anecdote she shared about an elderly supporter who placed an absentee ballot for Clinton.  The relevant part of Clinton's speech is:

In yesterday's poll something happened which I haven't seen done in such an obvious and blatantly stupid way in any other poll before. The voting on the next Sec. of the Interior was pretty much done, maybe a vote here and there was still coming but it was pretty much over. Then I noticed how the vote total for Les AuCoin (who had somewhere between 5 and 8 votes before this started) was slowly rising. At first it looked as if someone just wanted him to surpass Olypia Snowe who was in second place with 11 votes at that time. But that person didn't stop there. While the vote count for everyone else remained pretty much stagnant (Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s went from 60 to just 63 in this time frame), Les AuCoin's went from the single digits to a total of 42 votes. So, one person actually took the time to vote for him more than 20 times to get him into a runoff with Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Yesterday's Attorney General poll needed no runoff as John Edwards won more than 50% in the first round. Results below the fold.

With the Obama Veepstakes poll now concluded and Gov. Bill Richardson as your chosen running mate (which was covered by the Santa Fe Reporter) it's time to take this a step further:

Who would you like to see in an Obama cabinet?

Today you can vote on the next Secretary of the Interior:

A while back I broke down the likely delegate splits in Oregon and in Kentucky, now I'll take a look at the remaining states West Virginia, Montana, and South Dakota.

I'll start with West Virginia, which has 28 delegates to award on May 13.  They break down as follows (from the Green Papers:

• 10 delegates by statewide total
• 7 At-Large delegates
• 3 PLEO delegates

• 18 district delegates
• 6 delegates to WV-01
• 6 delegates to WV-02
• 6 delegates to WV-03

I went home to vote in the primary, i am in the millitary and had to go home before the primary to insure my absentee ballot was filled out for president.

A nonpartisan (and, at least theoretically, apolitical) event, by request.

My essay in Tuesday night's Top Comments:  Little Katrinas was a brief sketch of Shannon County, South Dakota, which is part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation.  To recap:  Shannon County is frequently the poorest county in the nation, and is currently the second poorest, and is still in many ways recovering from the impact of a 1999 series of tornadoes.

I also mentioned Loneman School in Oglala, where Nikki Pipe On Head estimates as many as half of their students qualify as homeless due to the dilapidated state of their homes.

In that diary and comments, I hinted at the topic for tonight, the efforts of one group of South Dakotans (and friends from around the country) to make a difference for Loneman School:  the simple, but ever-worthwhile book drive.

Below the fold there's more, just like it says on the tin.

We're so accustomed to brief frenzies of wall-to-wall national media coverage of all of the little Katrinas that happen around us from year to year--tornadoes, flash floods, bridge collapses, all the usual suspects--that we forget to notice, I think, whether we're told, later on, what ever became of all those miniature 9th Wards in small towns and forgotten rural corners.

Places like Shannon County, South Dakota.

More on this, and nifty things said today by Kossacks, in the Land Below the Fold.

My husband and I went canvassing for Obama today in South Dakota. The local Obama headquarters said that we might have been the first official canvassers in the state for Obama. We don't vote until June 3.

Yesterday, the NYT made an excellent Graphic showing how a few demographic questions about a county make it highly likely it was carried by Clinton or Obama.  I decided to look at all the upcoming races, and post maps to show my findings.  

South Dakota has not even voted yet, but Barack Obama, just picked up another superdelegate from the state (hat tip to Lowell of Badlands Blue.

This is an update to "The Cult of Popularity" from April 11 about the final ten contests in the Democratic Presidential Preference elections. Since we are just under one week until the Pennsylvania Primary - I thought now would be a good time for us to visit that "popular vote" strategy that Senator Clinton is trying to employ to sway delegates (both superdelegates and elected delegates) to her side.

I will repeat the same response I have whenever someone tries to rewrite the rules. The DNC determines the Democratic Nominee by only one measure: Delegate count in sanctioned, legitimate elections. However, to quell the cries, I've laid out the math of the popular vote scenario. Since the first post, Clinton has made a little headway in the projection (about 11,000 votes) due to a .8% increase in her Real Clear Politics average lead in PA and a new SurveyUSA poll in Kentucky. However, at the same time Obama has tightened the race in Indiana and increased his numbers in Montana and South Dakota while losing a smidgen in North Carolina.

cross-posted from Election Inspection

Below the flip, a rundown of the latest polls in Pennsylvania and North Carolina with predictions, plus Indiana, Kentucky, and South Dakota polls too.

Cross posted at Badlands Blue

The much awaited poll by Dakota Wesleyan University (jointly with the McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service) is now available.  From this morning's Argus Leader:

My name is Andrew Frank, and I am a 3rd year student at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, SD.  My class was responsible for conducting the 2008 DWU Tiger Poll, which asked citizens in both North and South Dakota their opinions about the upcoming elections.

The full press release is below the fold, but here are some of the key numbers for those of you who don't want to go through the whole thing:

SD Dem. Primary:  Obama-46    Clinton-34
ND Gen. Election:  McCain-44    Obama-38  (Within the margin of error)
ND and SD-Biggest issue facing the country today:  Economy-37   Iraq-15   Healthcare-8   Gas Prices-7

The first round of the Obama Veepstakes is over. Including the wildcard round, there are now only 16 out of 45 candidates left to vote on. The results of round I are below the fold.

You can vote on the 7th matchup of Round II below the fold. Prior to that I'd like to address a few suggestions made in previous comment sections.

I am starting an electoral college projection, based on State polls. There are 10 designations that States can be given, as you can see by the key. The designations are determined by State polls, with a bit of judgment thrown in. The State polls ultimately dictate what a State’s designation will be, however instead of using a formula, designations will simply be changed whenever there seems to be sufficient reason to do so. This way, hopefully one outlier will not determine a designation, but at the same time we can be responsive to shifts confirmed in more than one poll.

Currently, the preponderance of State polls has John McCain at a slight advantage in the electoral college, mainly because Obama is having difficulty in the Industrial midwest. According to recent polls, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are all leaning slightly towards McCain. In Michigan and Florida, the mismanaged Democratic primaries also seem to be helping McCain. If Michigan alone flips to Obama, the race becomes a 269-269 tie.

EI Electoral College Projection: 3/24/2008