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

Take This Endorsement And Shove It!
In Rhode Island. the Dem candidate for Governor said that today. Frank Caprio did not get an endorsement from President Obama. Moderate Repub Lincoln Chaffee, a Senate colleague of Obama, supported him in the 2008 Presidential race. Obama is officially neutral.

That was pretty funny

ElectionProjection upped the House forecast over the weekend. Predicting a pick up of 58 seats for the Repubs.

He's a Republican, though.

that is interesting, because the dems are all chanting that the polls are going their way. Presumably they are lying in the attempt to get Dems to drag their butts to the polls.
http://www.electionprojection.com/blog/

Lying is in the long term a bad move by the Dems. They already lack credibility with many Americans, they already are viewed as being dishonest and manipulative (as are the REPUPs), reinforcing this perception will not be good for them.

I misspoke. Chaffee was defeated in his Senate race in 2006 as a Repub. He is now an independent.

SENATE, 2010:
Depending on who you listen to, the Dems will end up with 51 or 52 seats vs 49 or 48 for the Repubs. I heard Nate Silver suggest 50-50. He talks in probability, though ("a 1 in 5 chance" of an outcome, which I am still trying to absorb). Two of the Dems seats would be Independents who caucus with the Dems.
Here are the 8 races which most pundits suggest are still "in play." That is, the leader is ahead by a percentage at or below the polling margin of error (typically, 4%).
California: Boxer (D) up 2.5%
Colorado: Buck (R) +1.0%
Nevada: Angle (R) + 0.7%
Washington: Murray (D) + 2.2%
Illinois: Kirk (R) + 2.8%
Kentucky: Paul (R) +4.3%
West Virginia: Manchin (D) +2.3%
Pennsylvania: Toomey (R) +2.5%

Disclaimer: These numbers are from Real Clear Politics and is a poll of polls.
Some of them are a bit stale (as in a week old) and some are from pollsters with a real or perceived bias.

I don't believe Fiorina has a chance in hell of beating Boxer. The rest I wouldn't bet on.

Cycloptichorn

A new poll by the LA Times raised some eyebrows over the weekend showing CA voters favoring Boxer over Fiorina (Senate) and Brown over Whitman (Governor) by high single digits.
I was dubious about that. Amusingly, I play on-line scrabble more than I should and often get matched with folks from CA. I ask them, in the chat feature, who they think will win vs who should win (explaining that I am a political junkie). Hardly a scientific survey, but the response has been heavily leaning towards the Dems.
And the marijuana legalization referendum also is predicted to pass by my scrabble buddies.

Fiorina's commercials are bad; she looks and sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West. And Boxer's are so repetitive as to make one want to break the TV. I can't think that either has had a good communication strategy.



Everyone thinks that one will pass, which leads me to believe that it probably will. We need the money, and we need to save the money on jails for people who don't deserve them!

Cycloptichorn

Charlie Cook is now predicting House gains by the Republicans to be in the low to mid-fifties, and 'significant' gains in the Senate. He continues to think:

That kid from Dartmouth (he also interned for Pollster.com this past summer) that I posted about way back has done a lot of work on analyzing the 2010 midterms. He's now predicting Republicans will gain 57.5 House seats (+/- 7.5) and says he'll let us know later today which ones will flip. He'll also expand on his Senate and gubernatorial forecasts later today.

Putting this here so we can evaluate the various pundits' accuracy after 11/2.

This just in from here in Charlottesville, Virginia:
President Obama will be in town on Friday, October 29th (approx 5 pm) to campaign for Tom Perriello (D) in the 5th District House of Representatives race.
Perriello upset long-time Republican Virgil Goode by some 700 votes in 2008 riding on Obama's coattails. In addition, Goode had become quite complacent and didn't realize that there was a change in the demographics of the 5th.
Perriello supports the health care legislation, the stimulus and cap-and-trade. These are not popular in the more rural areas of the district.
There have been very few polls. A SurveyUSA poll has the Republican candidate up by double digits, but a couple of more local polls show it possibly being very close.
I assume that Obama is coming in an effort to turn out voters in the liberal Charlottesville area (University of Virginia).
Perhaps internal polls show this as a contest worthy of the President's time. I can't see Perriello winning, though.

Colorado governor race, too weird for words;

Tom Tancredo of the American Constitutional Party looks at second place beating out the Republicans.

Interesting re the Gov race in CO. Maes is faring very badly (and will apparently not attend the Repub's Tuesday night gathering). Meanwhile Ken Buck, the Repub Senate candidate, is in a virtual tie with Michael Bennett (D).
Is Maes that bad a choice, or is Tancredo just too well known in the state?

In the next few days, I suspect Irishk and I will be trying to post the latest polling stuff. The order in which it comes out is random as we stumble across it.
SENATE
Rasmussen has moved Connecticut from Leans Dem to Solid Dem. Richard Blumenthal (D) seems to be lengthening his lead over Linda McMahon (R). Other polls are showing the same trend.
Rasmussen has moved West Virginia from Toss Up to Leans GOP. Other polls don't seem to support that, showing Joe Manchin (D) tied or perhaps slightly ahead of John Raese. There is no doubt that this will come down to the wire.
Rasmussen lists California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington as tossups and notes that the Repubs need to take 5 of the 6 to take the Senate.

I guess Ras is counting on the Repubs winning KY. If they lose that one, they'll have to take all 6 of his tossups.

From what I have been hearing, that is not a sure bet. But it could be that people don't want to say they are for it, but will actually vote for Prop 19.
I am getting quite weary of reporters working stoner quips into their articles, by the way.
That kind of cheesy writing should be left to people like us.

And then they'll stop off to buy some Cheetos on the way home from the polling booth

What Friedman says is so obvious. Please tell me why people don't get it.


Can't Keep a Bad Idea Down

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 26, 2010

I confess, I find it dispiriting to read the polls and see candidates, mostly Republicans, leading in various midterm races while promoting many of the very same ideas that got us into this mess. Am I hearing right?


The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman


Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in the Great Depression. Let’s roll back financial regulation — because we’ve learned from experience that Wall Street can police itself and average Americans will never have to bail it out.
Let’s have no limits on corporate campaign spending so oil and coal companies can more easily and anonymously strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to limit pollution in the air our kids breathe. Let’s discriminate against gays and lesbians who want to join the military and fight for their country. Let’s restrict immigration, because, after all, we don’t live in a world where America’s most important competitive advantage is its ability to attract the world’s best brains. Let’s repeal our limited health care reform rather than see what works and then fix it. Let’s oppose the free-trade system that made us rich.

Let’s kowtow even more to public service unions so they’ll make even more money than private sector workers, so they’ll give even more money to Democrats who will give them even more generous pensions, so not only California and New York will go bankrupt but every other state too. Let’s pay for more tax cuts by uncovering waste I can’t identify, fraud I haven’t found and abuse that I’ll get back to you on later.

All that’s missing is any realistic diagnosis of where we are as a country and what we need to get back to sustainable growth. Actually, such a diagnosis has been done. A nonpartisan group of America’s most distinguished engineers, scientists, educators and industrialists unveiled just such a study in the midst of this campaign.

Here is the story: In 2005 our National Academies responded to a call from a bipartisan group of senators to recommend 10 actions the federal government could take to enhance science and technology so America could successfully compete in the 21st century. Their response was published in a study, spearheaded by the industrialist Norman Augustine, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”

Charles M. Vest, the former M.I.T. president, worked on the study and noted in a speech recently that “Gathering Storm,” together with work by the Council on Competitiveness, led to the America Competes Act of 2007, which increased funding for the basic science research that underlies our industrial economy. Other recommendations, like improving K-12 science education, were not substantively addressed.

So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” “The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,’ says it all,” noted Vest. “The committee’s conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.’ ”

But I thought: “We’re number 1!”

“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today,” says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

“This is not a pretty picture, and it cannot be wished away,” said Vest. The study recommended a series of steps — some that President Obama has already initiated, some that still need Congress’s support — designed to increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education, to reinforce long-term basic research, and to create the right tax and policy incentives so we can develop, recruit and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the world. The goal is to make America the premier place to innovate and invest in innovation to create high-paying jobs.

You’ll have to Google it, though. The report hasn’t received 1/100th of the attention given to Juan Williams’s remarks on Muslims.

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers

Oh, my.

Charlie has updated his House prediction.



That's landslide talk.