TPMDC jumped the gun yesterday. The post was headlined “Why Sarah Palin Is About To Lose Big Time In Alaska’s Primary“.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has had plenty of successes this year, but might be about to rack up a big fail tonight as voters in her home state decide whether to oust Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

There are few public polls for this race but operatives for both Republicans and Democrats tell TPM they expect Murkowski to prevail tonight by a wide margin.

I guess that illustrates the pitfalls of making predictions when there are few public polls. Because Murkowski of course, is trailing her little-known opponent Joe Miller by a non-trivial margin of 48.6% to 51.5%:

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is battling for her political life this morning against Republican primary challenger Joe Miller, the Tea Party-backed candidate who had a slim lead as ballots continued to be counted overnight. Miller, a Fairbanks attorney, led from when the first returns came in Tuesday night, and was on the verge of pulling off one of the biggest election upsets ever in Alaska. With 84 percent of Alaska’s precincts reporting around 2 a.m., Miller had 45,188 votes to 42,633 for Murkowski.
[...]
The final results of the race won’t be known for over a week. The Alaska Division of Elections said over 16,000 absentee ballots were requested and as of Monday night 7,600 had been returned. The first count of absentees will be next Tuesday and there will be two subsequent counts as the absentee votes trickle in on Sept. 3 and on Sept. 8.