The Day Before

Final Update: A few final numbers. Usually about 5% of counties change voting procedures or types of machines in a given election. This time, it's 50%... The House has never changed parties unless the Senate has, too...The night before the 1994 midterm election when Republicans swept into power, their lead in the polls was 4%. In various polls, the Democrats are leading from 6% to 20%... In the CNN poll, 73% said they were "very angry" about the current state of affairs in America.

Update3: On the ground information suggest an upset may be in the works favoring Democrat Harold Ford in Tennessee, due to a combination of heavy early voting and bad weather forecast for the Republican-heavy area of the state. Also the GOTV efforts in Connecticut may be strong enough for Ned Lamont to upset Joe Lieberman. Lamont is the Dem candidate, Lieberman lost the primary and is running as an independent who will caucus with Democrats.

More Republican dirty tricks: vote suppression efforts in Virginia. This is Karl Rove's unsurprising and biennially disgusting November Surprise.

Update2: More buzz about Republican dirty trick robocalls. They've spent more than $2 million on them, over a half million just in the past few days. They include calling voters at 2 or 3 am. These calls seem to be on behalf of Democrats, but are designed to make voters angry enough to vote for Republicans. More info on robocall abuse with links here.

Update: A SurveyUSA poll with a good track record for catching last minute movement shows Democrat Jim Webb surging ahead in Virginia by an amazing 52-44%. This does conform with reports of small crowds and disorganization at Allen events over the weekend and this morning.
Other predictions: Republican-leaning pundit Larry Sabato predicts Democrats will win control of the Senate by picking up 6 seats, and the House by winning 29 seats. Analyst Charlie Cook gives a range of a 4 to 6 seat Democrat pickup in the Senate, and 20-35 seats in the House. MSNBC state by state polls shows very close races in key states, and predicts the Dems will fall short of Senate control. Kos of Daily Kos predicts a 6 seat Senate pickup and 24 House seats for the Dems. Chris Bowers at MyDD sees just a four or five seat pickup in the Senate, and 25 seats in the House.

Trends and factors: There may be a movement of Republicans "coming home" to hold their nose and vote for GOP candidates. Democrats remain ahead by double digits in generic polls, and continue to show greater interest and intensity. The predictions based on polls all show the Dems winning the House, and are split on getting those 6 seats necessary for the Senate. Another factor is GOTV, which appears competitive in key states, and on the ground operatives in Montana and Tennessee are happy with getting their early voters. Early voting used to favor Republicans, but maybe not this year.

To a certain extent, polling figures are weighted using past experience. If indeed there is a wave, these models are less relevant. Whether there will be a wave is the unanswered question. Interesting that Dem partisan Kos thinks there won't be, while Republican pollster Frank Luntz seems to indicate there will be. "There are some elections where the fear of the status quo is greater than the fear of change," he told the Wall Street Journal."This is one of those elections."



I may update this post throughout the day if there's reason and I have the time, but for now there are these highly interesting developments:

Political Wire reports that a couple of new polls to come out today show that the Senate race in Tennessee is tightening fast, which benefits the Democrat, Harold Ford. Some Dems had begun to write this one off.

One of those polls is the Gallup state by state, which has the Democrat ahead in Senate races in Missouri, Montana, Rhode Island and New Jersey, and with Democrat Webb down two points in Virginia.

Stuart Rothenberg's Rothenberg Report has predicted that Democrats will win the 6 Senate seats they need to win control, and 34 to 40 seats in the House, to claim a larger majority than the Republicans now have, leading to a number of Republican retirements in the next two years.

The American Conservative magazine is recommending that conservatives vote against Republicans to repudiate the Bush administration's prosecution of the Iraq war.

The blogosphere is abuzz with accounts of GOP robocall warfare--especially calls saying that are for Democratic candidates that repeat 6 or 7 times a day, including in the middle of the night. Some of these calls appear to violate several different laws, but so far Republicans are continuing this onslaught. Here's a thread at Kos about combatting them.