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.

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"November 6, 2006
Guest Columnist

The Long, Cost-Free War

By TED KOPPEL

IN the operations center at United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., there is a wall of television screens, one end of the wall quartered so that four live feeds can be seen simultaneously. The signals originate somewhere over Iraq or Afghanistan. The cameras are aboard pilotless drones.

"Predators," some are called, and predators they are. They can be equipped with Hellfire missiles that are remotely fired by operators in Nevada who receive their orders from Centcom in Florida. The enemy, meanwhile, does much of its killing with improvised explosive devices, the most sophisticated of which are designed in Iran.

Such is at least one face of modern warfare, in which combatants exchange mortal blows by remote control, once or even twice removed from the battlefield. The victims are just as dead or mutilated as those in previous wars, but the notion of violence activated from hundreds or even thousands of miles away is telling.

The Bush administration is trying to deal with a particularly nettlesome problem: preparing Americans for a struggle that may last decades without simultaneously demoralizing them. Centcom's commander, Gen. John Abizaid, likes to refer to it as the "long war," where "long," means generational, with no end in sight.

To the degree that such a war can be fought at arm's length, with a minimum of friendly casualties, it will be. To the extent that victory can be achieved with a minimum of personal sacrifice, the Bush administration will try to do so.

Senior members of the administration frame that struggle in existential terms. They invoke the nightmarish possibility of a 9/11 on steroids ?- a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, rattling the very foundations of our society. The Bush administration uses that frightening image to justify a new worldview, within which even associating with someone who belongs to an organization on the United States terrorist list justifies prosecution here at home.

This practice falls into the category of what Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty calls "preventative prosecution." It's an interesting concept: a form of anticipatory justice. Faced with the possible convergence between terrorism and a weapon of mass destruction, the argument goes, the technicality of waiting for a crime to be committed before it can be punished must give way to pre-emption.

Set aside for a moment the somewhat jarring notion of recalibrating our constitutional protections here at home while our soldiers and diplomats are given the thankless mission of spreading democracy in some of the most inhospitable regions of the Middle East.

There is a whiff of hypocrisy about conjuring up visions of a nuclear or biological holocaust while urging the American public to go about its business and recreation as usual.

We are advised to adjust to the notion of warrantless wiretaps at home, unaccountable C.I.A. prisons overseas and the rendition of suspects to nations that feature prominently on the State Department's list of human rights abusers, because the threats we face are "existential."

But apparently they are not existential enough to warrant any kind of widely shared commitment or sacrifice, like increased taxes or a military draft to meet the Pentagon's growing need for manpower.

One can share the Bush administration's perception that the United States confronts real threats that will not be eliminated easily or soon, but still find it impractical and immoral to get on with life as usual while placing the burden solely on the shoulders of the young men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, their families and friends.

We are left with the impression that the grown-ups in Washington would prefer to make the difficult decisions for us without involving the courts, Congress or the press. That is precisely the wrong way to go about winning this war. Back when the United States was widely admired, it was for all that was most cumbersome about our democratic process.

America's efforts to transplant democracy elicit none of that admiration. How can they, when we appear to have lost confidence in fundamental aspects of democracy here at home? What has historically impressed our allies and adversaries has been our often flawed, but ultimately sincere, determination to operate within the law ?- if not always abroad, then at least within the United States.

Does our system require calibration in the context of the Long War? Perhaps. We cannot, for example, expect to know everything our government does when transparency informs our enemies of what they must not know. That, however, has always been the case. Indeed, there are courts and Congressional committees set up for the express purpose of reconciling the needs for secrecy and for transparency.

Furthermore, when officials deem certain crimes (torture, for example) unavoidable in the defense of liberty, those who commit those crimes must still know that they will be held to account before an uncompromised legal system. Congress recently passed a law that ensures exactly the opposite.

It is going to be a long struggle, and we may have to live with whatever adjustments we make to our liberties until the struggle is won, or at least over. Even liberties voluntarily forfeited are not easily retrieved. All the more so for those that are removed surreptitiously.

One might have expected that these issues would feature prominently in the debate leading up to the Congressional elections. They are scarcely mentioned.

Apparently unnerved by the unceasing White House harangue that they are ill suited to waging the war on terrorism, Democrats have largely forfeited the argument that "war," particularly a "long war," may be the wrong prism through which to view the dangers facing the United States.

Those who once argued that the task was one for police and intelligence agencies have been mocked into silence. Democrats have given a wide berth to the invasion of privacy, selective suspension of habeas corpus and the mistreatment of detainees, preferring instead to echo the drumbeat of Republican warnings about terrorism in general.

There is a war to be waged. We should be building protective ramparts around our legal system, safeguarding our own freedoms, focusing on our own carefully constructed democracy and leading by example.

It's too bad that we have so little confidence in the most powerful weapon in America's arsenal."

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."


"

The following reports on a practice that is new to me, but I guess that I should not be surprised. And it is very, very inexpensive.

Again, from today's NYT.

"--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 6, 2006
New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who "push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy" should be controlled. If your reply is "yes," the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists "the same legal rights and privileges" as Americans.

Using a telemarketing tactic that is best known for steering consumers to buy products, the organizers of the political telephone calls say they have reached hundreds of thousands of homes in five states over the last several weeks in a push to win votes for Republicans. Democrats say the calls present a distorted picture.

The Ohio-based conservatives behind the new campaign, who include current and former Procter & Gamble managers, say the automated system can reach vast numbers of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional volunteer phone banks and is the most ambitious political use of the telemarketing technology ever undertaken.

But critics say the automated calls are a twist on push polls ?- a campaign tactic that is often criticized as deceptive because it involves calling potential voters under the guise of measuring public opinion, while the real intent is to change opinions with questions that push people in one direction or the other.

The calls have set off a furor in the closing days of a campaign in which control of Congress hinges on a handful of races.

Late last week, Representative Benjamin L. Cardin, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maryland, demanded a halt to the calls, saying "this sort of gutter politics" was distorting his record. Some political analysts said the practice could mislead voters and discourage them from taking calls from more objective pollsters.

Andrew Kohut, a longtime pollster and the president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, said the automated calling "smells like a push poll, it feels like a push poll, so I guess we have to call it a push poll."

But Harold E. Swift, one of the organizers of the Ohio group, said he viewed the move beyond phone banks or simple taped attack messages as a "very sophisticated approach to voter education." The goal, he said, is to "make people aware of the candidate's stand on the issues that are important to them."

Mr. Swift said his group, Common Sense Ohio, is a nonprofit advocacy organization and is financed by wealthy Republican donors. A sister organization, Common Sense 2006, has received a donation from the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee, an affiliate of the Republican Governors Association. Under federal law, the groups are not required to disclose their donors publicly or reveal how much money they have raised.

Mr. Swift acknowledged in an interview that if some critics thought the group's polling approach seemed deceptive, "I grant that they can reach that conclusion."

During the automated calls, which last about a minute, the moderator first asks whether the listener is a registered voter or which candidate he favors. Voters receive different sets of questions depending on how they answer. The system then asks a series of "yes" or "no" questions about different issues, and each answer guides the system forward.

For instance, in the Montana race, if a voter agrees that liberal-leaning judges seem to go too far, the moderator quickly jumps to another question that highlights the differences between Mr. Tester and the Republican incumbent, Senator Conrad Burns: "Does the fact that Jon Tester says he would have voted against common-sense, pro-life judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts, and Conrad Burns supported them, make you less favorable toward Jon Tester?"

In Tennessee, after listeners are asked if terrorists should have the same rights as Americans, this comparison between Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., the Democratic Senate candidate, and Bob Corker, the Republican, is given: "Fact: Harold Ford Jr. voted against the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and voted against renewing the Patriot Act, which treats terrorists as terrorists. Fact: Bob Corker supports renewal of the Patriot Act and how it would treat terrorists."

In some cases, Democrats say, the language is too provocative, and, in others, contrary facts are omitted. Mr. Ford and Mr. Tester, the Montana State Senate president, are both said in the calls to have voted repeatedly for tax increases, but no mention is made of the times they voted for tax cuts, their campaigns say.

Mr. Cardin, who supports stem cell research, said he was incensed that the issue was reduced to the notion that he voted to allow "research to be done on unborn babies," while his opponent, Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, "opposes any research that destroys human life."

Mr. Swift said his group had tried to report each candidate's views accurately. But, he said, "it is very challenging to take something as complex as a person's background and track record and communicate it in a 30-second sound bite."

He added, "This is a time of year for pretty strongly worded positions on all sides."

Even some Democratic strategists acknowledge that the distortions are no worse than the television and radio advertisements by both sides and that they probably do not cross any legal lines. While many Democratic campaigns and support groups also rely on computer-dialed telephone attacks, Republican leaders said they had not seen Democrats use any poll-like solicitations in the major races this year.

Common Sense Ohio was formed in July to run issue advertisements in the governor's race there, and it became involved in the Senate races in Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Tennessee, and in the abortion referendum in South Dakota.

Mr. Swift said two of the six people who formed the group, including its president, Nathan Estruth, worked at Procter & Gamble. Mr. Swift said that he and another of the organizers were retired from the company and that the group's members shared conservative views on taxes and social issues.

Mr. Swift, who was once in charge of global privacy issues at Procter & Gamble, said some of the donors asked the group to expand beyond Ohio. He said Mr. Estruth, who was traveling and could not be reached for comment for this article, was familiar with ccAdvertising, a company based in Herndon, Va., that was hired to place the Common Sense calls.

Gabriel S. Joseph III, the president of ccAdvertising, said in an interview that the company, which also handles commercial marketing campaigns, began using the interactive software in political and lobbying campaigns in 2000. Its chairman, Donald P. Hodel, was a cabinet official in the Reagan administration and later served as the president of two conservative groups, the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family.

Mr. Joseph said his computers could make as many as 3.5 million calls a day on behalf of all clients, at 10 to 15 cents a call. According to its Web site, the company has also run phone campaigns for a number of conservative organizations, including the National Rifle Association, and for businesses as varied as mortgage lenders and a local Starbucks.

Mr. Swift said that through the calls his group had identified core supporters, who will receive a reminder call on Election Day.

Neither Mr. Swift nor Mr. Joseph would say how many people had been called in the effort, though Mr. Joseph said his company had tried to reach every home in Maryland.

Given Census Bureau estimates of just over two million households in the state, the calls could cost $200,000 to $300,000.

Mr. Joseph said that in a typical campaign, half of the homes answered the calls. About 20 percent of the people who were called answered some of the questions, he said, and only about 10 percent completed an entire survey.

Despite the controversy, some experts question how much impact the calls will have amid the rest of the political fog, especially since some voters quickly get annoyed with the technique.

Richard H. Timberlake, a retired minister in Knoxville who supported Mr. Ford, said he hung up after the first two questions. "It became almost a barrage against him," Mr. Timberlake said."

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!