McCain wins Missouri's 11 electoral votes; Obama still president-elect
Fifteen days after the presidential election, John McCain was declared the unofficial winner of the state of Missouri, his 0.12% victory over Barack Obama delivering the Show Me State's 11 electoral votes to the Republican ticket.
Unfortunately for the Arizona Republican, that still leaves him on the short end of a 365-173 electoral total, with Democrat Obama easily topping the 270 mark needed for victory.
The narrow McCain Missouri victory, by just 3,902 votes out of 2,888,000 cast, means that Missouri sided with the presidential loser for just the second time in the last century.
Missouri also "got it wrong" in 1956, when it delivered a narrow 3,984-vote win to Democrat Adlai Stevenson over Republican incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The state had remained unclaimed this year as election officials awaited final results from four locales -- the city and county of St. Louis, Jackson County near Kansas City and from rural Montgomery County. Those tallies arrived Wednesday at the Secretary of State's office.
McCain gained 31 votes in the final returns, while Obama actually lost 235 votes. Election officials found that a figure for the ...
... Illinois senator had been improperly entered and corrected the error in the new totals, said spokesman Ryan Hobart.
The razor-thin margin was not the state's closest in a presidential race. In 1908 Republican William Howard Taft won the presidency with the help of Missouri over Democrat William Jennings Bryan, his 449-vote victory amounting to just 0.06 percentage points.
Democrats had hoped for better and, indeed, they won most other statewide races handily on Nov. 4, including Jay Nixon's more than 540,000-vote walloping of Republican Kenny Hulshof for the governor's office.
State elections officials will do more double-checking before they certify the results Dec. 9. But representatives of both campaigns said they had no reason to believe the outcome would change.
-- James Rainey
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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What the heck took them so long??
Posted by: Brian | November 19, 2008 at 04:08 PM
Missouri isn't much of a bellwether any more. It's several percent more Republican than the US average and has been for a while now if you look at the Likert scale.
Posted by: Joe | November 19, 2008 at 04:22 PM
... except for the fact that Obama is apparently not certified as a US citizen yet until he answers Judge Souter's order. we'll see. It's a good idea to begin Impeach Obama proceedings right away because as soon as he begins to flounder in his own overpromising and underdelivering he is done anyway.
Luke
Posted by: Luke | November 19, 2008 at 04:22 PM
Deep in the heart of darkest Amerikkka... Way to go MO, out of touch, yet again.
Posted by: Mike | November 19, 2008 at 04:56 PM
Either Obama or McCain in the White House means four more years of the same horrors. Listen to Jerome Corsi, Webster Tarpley and others discuss the dog and pony show known as the election. They are free MP3 downloads at http://drop.io/Summerbird
Posted by: Edward S. | November 20, 2008 at 02:20 AM
I think Missouri still is an indicator. It is indicative of a nation divided; right down the middle.
Posted by: Nancy MacRae | November 20, 2008 at 02:43 PM