Oh, No! Election Day is Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010...

WASHINGTON – Tilted toward the GOP from the start of the year, the political environment has grown even more favorable for Republicans and rockier for President Barack Obama and his Democrats over the long primary season that just ended with a bang.

With November's matchups set and the general election campaign beginning in earnest Wednesday, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that more Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction than did before the nomination contests got under way in February. Also, more now disapprove of the job Obama is doing. And more now want to see Republicans in control of Congress rather than the Democrats who now run the House and Senate.

The country's pessimism benefits the out-of-power GOP, which clearly has enthusiasm on its side. Far more people voted this year in Republicans primaries than in Democratic contests, and the antiestablishment tea party coalition has energized the GOP even as it has sprung a series of primary surprises.

No, the political establishment took a hit tonight.

Meanwhile, back in Delaware, O'Donnell did today get some $50K from the Republican National Senate Campaign Committee after all.

High Seas wrote:

I can't thank you enough

You're welcome.

Democrats think the results are good news for them. They are looking into the electoral abyss and, with a president diminishing in popularity, have for months tried in vain to sell their unpopular legislative accomplishments: the stimulus bill, Wall Street reform and the health care clunker. They now are shifting their strategy to running against the "kooks," as some call the Tea Party-endorsed winners..... I feel that strategy will fail as badly as the several others that they have tried.

You mistook my comment for irony - it was not.

My thanks to you and RJB are sincere: for 10 months now you've been diligently posting and linking to polls published by more than 10 polling organizations and individual analysts. Your last 3 posts (to which my last post was responding) concerned 3 polls that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, as were almost all of their predecessors.

It's not irony to ask at some point, how come? How could all the pollsters, forecasters, other political experts you and RJB have cited all this time, issue predictions that turned out to be completely swamped by a tide of actual results, all going in the opposite direction? And even if you don't know the answer to that, how can you go on and place any trust in any of your cited pollsters' predictions, given their abysmal track records?

More to the point - is there any political expert out there whose opinion, ex ante, turned out to be confirmed by the experimental results ex post?

There is one, whom I cited on your (RJB's) thread several pages back, when he correctly predicted Miller over Murkowski in Alaska. He also called correctly the NY (Paladino) and Delaware (O'Donnell) results. His politics (and mine, for that matter) aren't yours, so you chose to ignore that data.

"Another straw in the wind - Ed Rollins was the only one among the better-known pollsters to call the Alaska outcome correctly.

If we weren't facing national (and state) bankruptcy I wouldn't bother writing this. But (1) we are standing at the edge of a precipice and (2) I can't - yet - bring myself to believe that anyone posting here really wants us to go over that cliff; so I will try one more time:
Democrats think the results are good news for them. They are looking into the electoral abyss and, with a president diminishing in popularity, have for months tried in vain to sell their unpopular legislative accomplishments: the stimulus bill, Wall Street reform and the health care clunker. They now are shifting their strategy to running against the "kooks," as some call the Tea Party-endorsed winners..... I feel that strategy will fail as badly as the several others that they have tried.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/15/rollins.primaries.republican/?hpt=Sbin[

The next few weeks are going to be exciting, very important and, if the past is prologue, very unpredictable.

Voters, by a 9-point margin, believe Republicans will pick up both the House and the Senate, even though they are evenly divided over whom they intend to back in six weeks, according to a new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll.

In a generic matchup between the two parties, those surveyed were split 43-43 when asked if they would back a Republican or a Democrat on Election Day. This is good news for Democrats and at odds with many other public polls, which have shown Republicans holding a single-digit edge.

Better yet for Democrats, in several key regions with numerous House and Senate seats in play — namely, the Midwest and Northeast — they hold a 5-point advantage, suggesting the party’s congressional fortunes aren’t nearly as grim as the media coverage might suggest. (See: Full poll results and analysis)

Let's not forget that Lazio lost in the NY Gov race.....that shocked the hell out of me...

One thing I was just thinking, if things go south for the Dems and they lose Congress, and they call a lame duck congress to try to pass some liberal legislation all hell is going to break lose. There is no way that the country is going to stand for that based upon what I am seeing right now. Citizens will descend upon the mall in Anger. At that point Obama might as well hang it up...the GOP could run anyone, even Palin against him, and would win.

CONNECTICUT: Richard Blumenthal (D) vs Linda McMahon (R)
.... Quinnipiac (9/12): Blumenthal + 6
.... Rasmussen (9/9): Blumenthal +9
........ MY PICK: Johnboy (9/16): Blumenthal