WHO WILL WIN IN NOVEMBER?

sumac, Good article; I'm gonna post it to other threads on a2k.

Over at The New Republic's The Plank, Noam Scheiber is being psyched out by the latest ABC/WaPo poll - which does not look good for the Dems at all. It has their lead in the generic ballot question cut drastically, and has the indicators on all other questions moving back away from them as well.

Another poster added that the last Pew poll out looks even worse.

I'll copy my comment to that here:

From nimh's post: These are the first four polls out that ran in their entirety after Kerry's botched joke. The Pew and ABC/WaPo polls suggest the Dems have paid for Kerry's joke with their lead being cut in half, or even to a third. The Newsweek and Time polls suggest there has been no noticeable fallout.

Some claimed it had no impact; I was not one of those.

24 hours is an eternity just before an important election. Then came the Haggert business. I have been watching Sunday political programming on and off all day - there has been no mention at all, even on Fox, of a precipitous decline in Democratic numbers. Curious as to the discrepancy.

Trying to analyze an election a few days/hours before the polls open on an election with so many diversionary news is difficult at best. Exit polls might be our next best bet.

And there's the whole Saddam death penalty thing.. which will work out negatively for the Dems, though it wont have as much effect as one would have thought a year ago.

On that score, I doubt most Americans give a shet about Saddam over all the deaths of Americans soldiers that keeps increasing.

I also believe the Saddam issue falls way below Kerry's gaff.

There was some continuing discussion last night, as during the day, of the tightening of some races and how Republicans appear to be "coming home". Presumably those comments, although without specific referents, may have stemmed from the changes in numbers mentioned above.

What was mentioned was how the Dem voters were energized back in August and September, the Republicans are getting energized now. No mention of whether the Dem voters are still energized.

The above is in today's NYT. I hit submit before I attributed it.

"From Editors & Publishers:

After President Meets Reporters, Sullivan -- Once a Bush Backer -- Now Suggests He May Have 'Lost His Mind'

By E&P Staff

Published: November 01, 2006 10:00 PM ET

NEW YORK In a move that no doubt sent a shiver through several candidates in his own party, President Bush, in a special interview with wire service reporters in the White House, today guaranteed a job for his Pentagon chief for two more years, adding that both Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney "are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them."

But it wasn't only endangered Republicans who have been calling for Rumsfeld's ouster who may have blanched. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative writer who was once a key media supporter for the Iraq war, denounced the latest Bush statement on CNN on Wednesday night, stating that the president is so delusional, "This is not an election anymore, it's an intervention."

Sullivan said the president was "so in denial," comparing the Rumsfeld endorsement to applauding the job FEMA's Michael Brown did on Katrina: "It's unhinged. It suggests this man has lost his mind. No one objectively could look at the way this war has been conducted, whether you were for it, as I was, or against it, and say that it has been done well. It's a disaster.

"For him to say it's a fantastic job suggests the president has lost it, I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it.....These people must be held accountable." He added that today, Richard Perle, a leading neocon and Iraq war backer, had today called the administration "dysfunctional."

Rep. John Boehner, the second-ranking Republican in the House, said, also on CNN: "Let's not blame what's happening in Iraq on Rumsfeld. But the fact is, the generals on the ground are in charge, and he works closely with them and the president." "

By Stacy Parker Aas from today's Huffington Post:

Bio

"11.04.2006

Fight the Ground War This Tuesday (10 comments )
READ MORE: George W. Bush

GOTV is not glam. GOTV can be down-right dirty. But GOTV is what wins or loses us this election.

GOTV stands for "Get out the Vote." Really though, it's the ground war. It's what all of the commercials, the speeches and the mailings have led up to--this day-long contest of who can get the most bodies to polls (that actually work).


When I started out in politics, I knew nothing about GOTV. I was eighteen years old, studying political communication at George Washington University, and volunteering in the White House. It was 1993 and we all wanted to be George Stephanopoulos. We wanted to be Carville and Begala. We wanted to be visionaries, to learn how to craft the most perfect messages, to write the most powerful speeches so that hearts and minds would be won.

I saw what it was like to wage the air war. What I never saw, as I walked down those soft carpeted halls of the West Wing, was the ground war. I didn't have grounding in how politics was played at the local level. I didn't know about GOTV. I had no idea what was at stake when our armies of operatives and volunteers went out on Election Day. I didn't know that while the rest of us sat on pins and needles, those armies were out there fighting hand-to-hand combat.

See, I had only voted in Troy, Michigan. Lovely, safe, suburban Troy, Michigan. Where everything was tidy and neat. It never occurred to me that in this day and age, in cities up and down I-75, machines didn't work, people went down the street with bullhorns giving erroneous poll information, and that poll watchers could intimidate poll counters. I never knew that coordinated campaigns set up legal war rooms to field the hundreds of calls reporting irregularities, and sabotage, both indirect and direct.

Then of course came the year 2000, the year most of us lost our election innocence. Since then, we can no longer pretend that every election is fair, or that it will go off correctly without plenty of engagement and oversight on our part.

This is where you come in.

In every state, there are opportunities for you to "get out the vote." If you volunteer, you may be asked to call and remind likely voters to vote. You may be asked to drive a van to get people to the polls. You may be asked to knock on doors. There are also opportunities to be poll watchers. If you do so, you will witness the process on our behalf. The two past presidential elections have proven that we need such witnesses now more than ever.

There are few times in life when one day of volunteer service can make a difference. This Election Day, please volunteer as many hours as you can spare.

Click here to find the number for your local party. Tell them you want to help on Election Day. If you are in a "shoe-in" district, think about working in another district that has a tighter race.

In 2004, I went back to Michigan and helped on the coordinated campaign. I spent those first moments of the morning walking past the desks of phones reserved for volunteer phonebankers. Staffers didn't stop there. You kept going. Past the curtain. The volunteers did the calling, and campaigns have a hierarchy. But our party made a point of asking us to go canvassing. For one night, the entire staff went door-to-door, encouraging people to vote for our ticket.

I have to say, I relished the chance. I remember standing in the kitchen of a kind Warren woman, talking about why I felt President Bush let us down, listening to her worries about Kerry, and me trying to assuage them. I don't know if I changed her mind, but I know that we had a few moments together, where I listened to her, and she listened to me, and I knew that this is what politics could be at its best: two people trying to find common ground.

Before, I thought the magic only happened in the War Room. I was wrong. The magic happens when you actually talk to another person. When you ask them to vote. When you drive the car that allows them to vote. And if called upon, to explain why you support the candidates you do. In the War Room, you're trying to create the perfect smart bomb. You're trying to craft the right message to push the right buttons en masse. But if each one of us can be on the ground, encouraging, competing, showing the other side that we're watching, that we won't stand for intimidation, this will be the year we push back and win."

Here we go, and I have to get a clipboard so that I can capture the link as well. This is from the lead story in today's NYT:

"The announcement out of Baghdad came as polls suggested some gains for Republicans. A Pew Research Center Survey released on Sunday found that the number of likely voters who said they would vote for the Democrats was now 47 percent compared with 43 percent who said they would vote for Republicans. Two weeks ago, Democrats had an edge of 50 to 39. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found a similar tightening.

These kinds of polls, about the so-called generic ballot, measure national trends and do not necessarily provide an accurate measure of what is happening in individual House and Senate races. Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Center, said the poll nonetheless found that Republicans were becoming more enthusiastic as Election Day approached, a sign that the party was making progress in addressing one of its main problems this year: a dispirited base."


"

Oh, hell, who can tell anything at this point.

The Robocalls I've been reading about are pretty despicable. I'm sure that we will see some lawsuits after the elections.

Still predicting 20+ in the House, 5+ in the Senate for a tie. I don't really care too much about the Senate; if the House is won, it would satisfy me completely. The Senate was never really on my radar anyways...

Cycloptichorn

Even worse than normal robocalls are the new technique.

In some districts Republican supporters are reportedly making robocalls at late hours of the night claiming to be from Democrats. The idea is to anger the recipients into not voting (or a protest vote for the Republicans).

This is almost certainly illegal.

Best political and election coverage is on MSNBC.

'Who will win in November?'

Daniel Ortega!