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

But Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan political handicapper, questioned how successful labor’s push will be. “The question is, how effective can labor be when so many of their people are unemployed or underemployed and just not happy campers?” he said. “How effective will they be in getting people to do the hard work — to do the phone banks, the get-out-the-vote, all the heavy lifting?”

Patricia Elizondo, president of the 2,000-member Milwaukee local of the International Association of Machinists, fears just that.

“People are disappointed,” she said. “People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the healthcare bill was not as good as they expected. Two years ago, I had many members going door-to-door to campaign. Now they’re saying, ‘Why should I? We supported that candidate, but he didn’t follow through.’ ”

Republicans are headed for big gains in the Senate in the November 2 election, but winning a majority will be difficult, according to poll averages compiled by the website Real Clear Politics.

BREAKING: Murkowski plans to run as write-in candidate

Another prediction: if people think there is a revolution now in the GOP wait for the presidential campaign for 2012. If the DeMint/Palin conservatives are mostly successful in their bids for office do you think conservatives will settle for Romney, the 'moderate' that signed the MA equivalent of Obamacare and flip-flopped on abortion? Sure it is Romney's 'Turn" but that rationale might be as electorally successful as Rep. Castle's Senatorial bid.

, if the GOP estab boys had any cojones they would follow up with their threat to strip her of her leadership position which she is now using in her write in campaign as a rationale for her re-election (you know the old bring home the bacon argument). This would also be a great time for the GOP to demonstrate their supposed new found disdain for earmarks, but I'm not holding my breath here.

The question now is whether a grassroots movement that is, by design, leaderless can sustain itself after this election cycle.

In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party's most important legacy may be organizational, not political.

[Complete Coverage: The Tea Party Movement]

From Washington's who's-in-charge-here perspective, the tea party model seems downright bizarre. Perplexed journalists keep looking for the movement's leaders, which is like asking to meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with.

"There's such a uniqueness to every one of these groups, just as there's an individuality to every person," says Dawn Wildman, a national coordinator based in San Diego. "It has this bizarre organic flow, a little bit like lava. It heats up in some places and catches on fire; it moves more slowly in other places."

Listening to tea partiers talk about their ambitions, one hears echoes of leftist movements. Raise consciousness. Change hearts, not just votes. Attack corruption in society, not just on Capitol Hill. In America, right-wing movements have tended to focus on taking over politics, left-wing ones on changing the culture. Like its leftist precursors, the Tea Party Patriots thinks of itself as a social movement, not a political one

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Congratulations on killing a long running thread, if that was your goal.

Thanks for becoming my friend, Irishk. It has been a pleasure to get to know you. And thanks to the many of you who have viewed this and written to me via email.

The decline is relatively modest and you could plausibly explain it away as a reflection of views on other issues. (I.e., if people weren't so down on the economy, they wouldn't be so down on health care reform.) But you certainly can't argue that people are enthusiastic about reform these days, since the numbers were tepid even before the decline. In the latest CBS/New York Times poll, published on Wednesday, just 37 percent of respondents said they approved of the law, while 49 percent said they disapproved.

Still, if you dig deeper into the same poll, you'll find that public sentiment on health care reform is more complicated than those figures suggest. While 40 percent of respondents said they supported repealing the Affordable Care Act, more than half changed their minds (leaving just 19 percent in favor of repeal) when pollsters mentioned that it'd mean letting insurance companies exclude people with pre-existing conditions. ...

I know that. You can have this one.
Congratulations on killing a long running thread, if that was your goal.

Thanks for becoming my friend, Irishk. It has been a pleasure to get to know you. And thanks to the many of you who have viewed this and written to me via email.
Over to you, Hawkeye.

RJB sorry for my exchange with hawkeye and disrupting your thread

New PPP results for dkos, will post tomorrow -- Feingold down by double digits, MASSIVE intensity gap. W/o gap, it'd be tied race.