Topic: Lets go to the Polls.......

[sophist]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/

Dems landslide? 

[sophist]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

You Read It Here First!

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2006; 7:36 AM

Why wait for the tedious task of counting the votes? I'll tell you right now what will be in tomorrow's papers:

"Ushering in a new political alignment that could render President Bush impotent in his final two years, Democrats swept to victory in the congressional elections yesterday as voters vented their frustration with the war in Iraq, Republicans scandals in particular and GOP incumbents in general.
   
About This Column

    * xml Sign Up for RSS Feed 
    * Media Notes Archive 
    * How RSS Works 

Media Notes Extra

    * The Democrats Are Coming! (Right?)
    * Nattering Negativity
    * Kerry's Sorry Moment
    * There He Goes Again
    * Boy Genius or Turd Blossom?

More Stories
Save & Share Article   What's This?
Digg
Google

del.icio.us
Yahoo!

Reddit
Facebook

"The results set the stage for the first real power-sharing in Washington in a half-dozen years as incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew up plans to push progressive legislation, and broke the stranglehold that Republicans have had on Capitol Hill since the 1994 revolution that carried Newt Gingrich to power.

"White House officials said the president would remain just as aggressive in pursuing his agenda and expressed confidence that the Democrats will be forced to compromise rather than be painted as obstructionist. 'It could have been far worse,' said a senior administration official who insisted anonymity to deliver the official spin without having his name attached. 'We feel like we dodged a bullet.

"Tuesday's results amounted to a political earthquake whose aftershocks will be felt from Bangor to Baghdad, and throughout western civilization."

How's that? What happens if the Dems don't win? I've got that covered, too:

" In a stunning surprise that defied expectations, the Republicans held onto their Capitol Hill power base yesterday, bolstering President Bush in the final two years of his term and dashing the hopes of Democrats who thought that they were about to emerge from the political wilderness.

"In turning back a stiff challenge from the Democrats despite the accumulated setbacks of war and scandal, the GOP rendered inoperative a spate of preelection polls, mindlessly parroted by the media, which seemed to assure that their party's 12-year hold on power would be undone by an unpopular president and an equally unpopular war.

"It was a crushing defeat for House Minority Leader Nancy Peolsi and her fellow Democrats, who had already ordered drapes for their new offices, and left party strategists wondering whether they would be shut out of power for the remainder of the century. 'It's all Karl Rove's fault,' said a senior party strategist who insisted on anonymity so he could deflect blame for the debacle. 'We made the campaign about bashing Bush and the war, but once Rove got rid of "stay the course" we lost our main talking point.' "

See how easy it is?

Meanwhile, no shortage of prognostication out there. Weekly Standard predictions : Bill Kristol says the Dems will take the House (winning 40 seats) and Senate. Fred Barnes says the Dems will seize only the House. In fact, only one of the Standard's pundits, Andrew Ferguson, sees the Republicans holding the House.

In the WashPost's biennial contest, Mort Kondracke, Tucker Carlson and even conservative activist Paul Weyrich predict a Democratic House, but a Republican Senate. Only two GOP strategists, Mary Matalin and Kellyanne Conway, forecast the Republicans holding the House (albeit by one seat).

Kos sees the Dems taking both houses, including Ned Lamont (in whose ads Markos has appeared) pulling out a squeaker in Connecticut.

But conservative blogger Dean Barnett remains confident:

"The Republican Party is going to pull off the greatest feat of political sleight of hand in history on Tuesday as it gets its partisans to the polls in numbers more befitting a presidential year than a midterm. This will affect every close race in the country."

Josh Marshall broke the story of the harassing robo-calls, and the MSM has been trying to catch up:

"We checked out the stories of false flag GOP robocalls pretty closely before we were comfortable that we understood what was happening, could confirm it and start reporting on it yesterday. Now, over the course of the day, we've been getting other reports of Democrats getting calls informing them their voting location has been changed to what turns about to be a fake voting location.

"TPMmuckraker reported on this earlier today about reports in New Mexico. But it wasn't clear whether or not it was an isolated incident.

"Over the course of the day, though, we've been getting more reports of this from across the country -- NM, MN, WI, NY and other states. Enough that I'm starting to suspect that this is some sort of coordinated effort. (If this is a coordinated effort, I suspect it'll be much more carefully hidden than the false-flag robocalls, since I suspect this would tip the scales into prosecutable election tampering.)

"Let me be crystal clear: in the case of the false flag robocalls, we've heard the calls; we know the company placing them; we know the GOP committee paying for them; we know the complaints surfacing around the country. This is different. These reports are still too sketchy to say whether this coordinated or being directed nationally. In some cases, it may not even be intentional. With two mammoth GOTV operations ramping up nationwide, some confusion is probably inevitable. But we're hearing a sufficient number of reports from different parts of the country, to send up a flare, a virtual alert, if you will. So don't treat this is a fact but rather as an advisory, to be on the lookout."

Salon's Walter Shapiro wonders if the media haven't gotten just a little carried away:

"If you turned on the talking-head shows on Sunday morning television, you would have heard more talk about tsunamis than at a convention of Asian weather forecasters. This has been a year when aquatic metaphors about Democratic tidal waves and flood tides have replaced the usual horse-race analogies that dominate political discourse. But could the widely forecast Democratic sea surge amount to just a few gentle waves lapping on the shores of the Republican majority?

"That is the puzzle 48 hours before the actual votes begin rolling in. State and local polls -- especially for those House races in which reliable survey data is available -- still point to a dramatic Democratic sweep. Interviews about individual House districts with campaign operatives, political science professors and other experts from around the country point toward the same win-back-the-House conclusion. But in covering politics, there is always a danger that comes from sticking with the conventional wisdom a beat too long if the public mood suddenly begins to shift."

John Podhoretz isn't predicting a GOP victory--but he doesn't believe the polls either:

"So three major polls released this weekend show Republicans cutting the Democratic advantage on the so-called 'generic' question to single digits -- with Dems leading by 4, 6 or 7 points rather than the double digits they've been running consistently in recent months. I think what this tells you is almost nothing. Here's why . . .

"If Republicans hang on to the House and Senate, it won't mean that these new polls measured any real change. It will mean, instead, that all the polling in this midterm election was garbage -- that, indeed, polling is in a crisis because it can no longer measure anything specific owing to the increasing sophistication and annoyance of Americans dealing with telephone solicitors.

"What's more, pollsters know most of their polls this year were garbage, as did those who sponsored them, and yet they went ahead and did them and reported on them anyway. They were garbage because pollsters are getting response rates on their calls maybe two out of ten tries -- which means that simply for them to get enough respondents to poll, they have had to dig for every last voice they could."

Hmm...When was the last time you agreed to talk to a pollster?

Betsy's Page is suspicious of the widely varying results:

"Whatever you think of the generic ballot question - and I have little use for it - it's clear that something fishy is going on. The Washington Post comes out with a poll today that shows that the generic ballot among likely voters shows that, in the past two weeks, the Republicans went from being down 14 to being down 6. Just the trend you'd expect as the race tightens up at the finish line. Perhaps, Republicans are coming home. But not if you read the Newsweek poll. Their generic poll of likely voters show a 16 point difference in favor of the Democrats. Something has got to give. They can't both be right."

A big uproar is brewing over this released-in-advance Vanity Fair piece on neocons expressing varying degrees of regret over Iraq. A number of them are crying foul, as National Review reports:

" David Frum : Vanity Fair then set my words in its own context in its press release. They added words outside the quote marks to change the plain meaning of quotations.When I talk in the third quotation above about failures 'at the center,' for example, I did not mean the president. If I had, I would have said so. At that point in the conversation, I was discussing the National Security Council, whose counter-productive interactions produced bad results.

" Richard Perle : Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country."

Andrew Sullivan can barely believe Perle's comments:

"He says he now believes that the Great Leader is essential to the next Glorious Five Year Plan for Iraq. He sounds like that dude shot in the face by Cheney, who subsequently apologized for getting in the way.

"There's one thing to say here. Perle says he is concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's election.

"Say what again? Perle is supposed to be a thinker, and a patriot. Why on earth would an intellectually honest person not make sure that their real views are aired on a critical matter before an election? Isn't that the point? . . .

"An intellectual movement that has become this intellectually dishonest deserves to die."

Huffposter Steve Clemons is equally appalled:

"In other words, Perle is putting his duplicitousness into the public square for all to see.

"He has one truth he's willing to market before the election -- and another after."

But blogger Jenny Hatch blames Graydon Carter and his crowd:

"They just don't get it.

"The delusional, dinkeldorf editors at Vanity Fair just don't get it . . .

"In this post about Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with ABC news, I said two days ago regarding the Vanity Fair article by David Rose:

" I'm disapointed in my fellow Neo-Cons that they have seemingly chosen to abandon the President and his policies.

"But knowing the press and Vanity Fair in particular as I do, I don't doubt that this hit piece on the president twisted the words of the Neo-Cons and they are using this article (which will no doubt be trumped up as loudly as possible over the next three days) as an attempt to sway the voters right before the election .

"The Vanity Fair editors and their cohorts who are guilty of Media crimes just do NOT get it.

"The world has changed. No more will they be able to sway elections with an October surprise, November surprise, or last minute saturday night live sketches intended to sway people in that last minute vote."

I would have thought it'd be a stretch to tie the Rev. Ted (I only bought meth and got a back rub) Haggard to the administration, but that doesn't deter Arianna :

"Let's face it: the Bush administration is sick. The fall of Ted Haggard is just the latest manifestation of the central disease of President Bush and his cohorts: the pathological refusal to accept reality, and the delusion that reality can be changed by rhetoric . . .

"Was Ted Haggard's absurd claim this week that, yes, he saw Mike Jones, but only for massages and that, yes, he bought meth from Jones but never used it, really that different from Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld continuing to claim we're winning in Iraq?

"That both the Reverend's and the administration's claims were made with the expectation that the public would buy them shows what the chronic refusal to acknowledge reality does to one's judgment."

Peter Beinart argues in the New Republic that the administration is winking at bigotry:

"George W. Bush never promised that his brand of Republicanism wouldn't be nasty. What he did promise, from virtually the moment he entered the national stage, was that it wouldn't be bigoted . . .

"On race, the RNC recently ran an ad showing a scantily clad white woman winking seductively at black Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford -- a blatant appeal to white fears of interracial sex. Asked about the ad's racial subtext, Mehlman responded, 'I will tell you that when I looked at the ad, that was not my reaction,' thus exhibiting the same willful blindness toward racism for which he apologized several months ago.

"And, on gays, it has been even worse. In campaign speeches, Vice President Dick Cheney routinely warns that, if Democrats take the House, the openly gay Barney Frank will become a committee chairman, 'and I don't need to tell you what kind of legislation would come.' When The Boston Globe slyly asked Cheney's office what sinister legislation Frank might produce as head of the Financial Services Committee, the veep's staff had no answer. And the real answer is obvious: Cheney was gay-baiting, pure and simple.

"Is Cheney, the father of a lesbian, a homophobe? Of course not. Cheney, Mehlman, and Bush are not bigots -- they genuinely want an inclusive Republican Party, just not as genuinely as they want to hold Congress. And that's what makes it all so pathetic."

Finally, Drudge always manages to find the weirdest news item of the day, often from the Daily Mail :

"A mother of six was jailed for seven years today for turning her sister-in-law into a domestic slave.

"Antonia Pearson-Gaballonie, 35, kept Veronica Sandeman, now 26, as a slave, assaulted her, forced her to work naked and made her beg for food over a number of years, York Crown Court heard."

And that's the naked truth.

[nab]

I'm just glad that I get to vote against Conrad Burns here in Montana.  There is also a local initiative to make marijuana a low priority for law enforcement.  It probably won't make a bit of difference in terms of police attitude towards pot around here, but I will probably vote for it because of the social message it sends to the feds (i.e. stop wasting our time and money on a war against pot).   

[sophist]

i voted a few hours ago.  I split b/w libertarian(state congress) and Democrat(Congresspersons for DC seats)

[Guyute]

I hate the CT Senate race, there simply is no good choice.

[sophist]

sorry to hear that.

I would write in Aug

[flow00]

I'm going to vote now. In Michigan, we have a Democratic governor and US senator trying to retain their seats against tough opponents. What's more interesting here are the local political races. There are some scary Republicans on county boards and running for judge.

[cleech74]

I voted, and I have the sticker to prove it!    Hope everyone voted today!  It's our right!

[cleech74]

+1 Karma for all the voters.

[antelope19]

I voted, and I have the sticker to prove it!    Hope everyone voted today!  It's our right!

Yup, me too, voted this morning.  Leech, on a local note, what do you think about the race for governor?  I think its gonna be a barn burner, way too close to call right now. Both Candidates make good arguments, although I have not enjoyed all of the dirty ads that completely trash one another, but thats the way it goes.  Did you catch any of the debates?   

[Hicks]

I voted two days ago, here in Oregon we don't even have any polls anymore it's all by mail (or drop off), which I think is the best way to protect against fraud.

I even voted to increase my property taxes so someone else's brats can get educated, man being a selfless liberal is tough sometimes! 

[jonyem]

I voted by absentee.
VERY confident in picking the winners.

[mattstick]

Have the Republicans lost yet?

[susep]

Have the Republicans lost yet?

in due time...

[jonyem]

Have the Republicans lost yet?

in due time...

And when they do, I'm gonna party like it's 1992!!