The statewide vote count tonight shows Gov. Chris Gregoire with a lead of two percentage points over Republican challenger Dino Rossi. Gregoire just told TVW that Rossi should look for meaning in the returns:

I hope this is a message to him and his friends that negative campaigning isn’t going to work.

Gregoire won her office by 133 votes, so maybe those two points look like a mandate. I'll stick with my prediction that tonight's results won't predict much at all.

When I last checked there were about 746,000 voies counted in the governor's race. I bet that's more than half the votes we'll get tonight. Gregoire has 48 percent of those and Rossi has 46 percent.

It's enough for Rossi to issue a statement:

We had a strong showing in the primary tonight. Current returns show we have received over 45 percent of the vote. To put these results into perspective, during the 2004 campaign I received just 34 percent of the vote in the primary and the General Election turned out to be significantly closer.

Fewer than half of the voters who will vote in November cast their ballots in this primary. Independent polls of all voters show this race is a statistical dead heat and I feel confident going into the General Election. I’m happier having 45 percent tonight than the 34 percent we got in the 2004 primary.

What matters is that we placed in the top two and now the General Election begins. We still have a long way to go until November and I will continue to talk about the issues that matter most to the people of Washington state, like addressing the budget deficit, fixing our transportation system, improving education, and keeping our communities safe. ...

In the expectations game, this could be the low-water mark: "What matters is that we placed in the top two ..."

Two Supreme Court justices and a Court of Appeals judge facing challenges appear to be doing well with a couple hundred thousand primary night ballots counted.

Supreme Court Justice Mary Fairhurst is leading Michael Bond 60/40. Justice Charles Johnson is only a little bit behind that, with 58 percent to James Beecher's 31 and Frank Vulliet's 11.

On the Division II Court of Appeals, Judge Robin Hunt has 65 percent of the vote and challenger Tim Ford has 35 percent with a little more than 85,000 votes counted.

Yep, real early to make any calls on these races. But after an unusually quiet primary these court races are among the more interesting things to watch tonight.

Good evening all. I had hoped to be able to use our live-blogging and chat software but we’re having some technical difficulties. So I’ll start here, the old-fashioned way and try to post through the evening as news warrants.

Let me start by saying I don’t think it makes sense to read too much into tonight’s results in the race for governor, other statewide officials except SPI or the 8th District Congressional race.

There is just too many differences between primary voters and general election voters.

I’ve heard from a lot of campaigns with their pre-spin and expectations. But history is on my side here.

Take the governor’s race. in 2004, Chris Gregoire 504,018 votes and Dino Rossi got 444,337. In addition, Democrat Ron Sims got 228,306 votes. That could have led Democrats to think they had a pretty good showing. Gregoire alone polled more votes than Rossi and those Sims votes could have been assumed to go Gregoire’s way come November.

But we all know what happened in November. Rossi and Gregoire were in a dead heat. So maybe all the Sims votes went to Gregoire. But of those who didn’t vote in the primary, enough backed Rossi to show him the winner come election night.

We can learn something from the Lands Commissioner race that year, too. In the primary Democrat Mike Cooper got 600,495 votes. Republican Doug Sutherland got only 433,077 votes. But there’s no Commissioner Cooper this year. Sutherland won in November with 1.3 million votes to Cooper’s 1.22 million.

If you look at this video of Democrat Darcy Burner, you can see she put a lot of importance on doing well tonight.

But two years ago Burner got a few thousands votes more than Reichert in the primary. Both ran unopposed for nomination. And in November, Reichert beat Burner by about 7,000 votes.

So if, for example, Burner finishes behind Reichert tonight, would it make sense for national Democrats - and that’d be her fear - to stop putting money into the 8th District? I just can’t see that, or the reverse, unless someone really just bites it tonight.

A note on the 8th: Reichert Chief of Staff Mike Shields told me this afternoon he will be taking a leave from the official office to run Reichert’s general election campaign.

After the polls close tonight I plan to do a little live-blogging and, I hope, a lot of chatting with you all about the state's first-ever top two primary. The campaigns have already flooded me with their pre-spin so it'll be fun to see how the expectation game plays out.