Are you a voter in a non-battleground state and feeling a little out of the game? When the phone rings, do you hope against hope it’s one of those notorious robocalls trashing a political candidate?
If so, you’re in luck. There’s a web site sponsored by the National Political Do Not Contact Registry that catalogues and supplies links to every robocall they can find this year, not just at the presidential level but everywhere.
So if you’re feeling lonely and ignored in the final frenzy of this campaign year, download a few robocalls and imagine yourself being harassed.

Last week was a really bad week for the McCain-Palin ticket, according to the Media Consortium’s useful summary of the news at HuffPo. You had the Colin Powell endorsement of Obama, the Palin Shopping Spree story, the Palin the Rogue Candidate story, and of course the bizarre racial hoax in Pittsburgh instigated by a College Republican staffer. And day by day, the message of the GOP ticket became nastier and more remote from real-life issues.
Check it out for a stroll down short-term-memory lane.

The latest, and perhaps last, gimmick of the McCain-Palin campaign is to “guarantee” victory. Here’s how John McCain put it on Meet the Press yesterday:

“I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I’m going to win it,” McCain told interim “Meet” moderator Tom Brokaw. “We’re going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We’re going to win it, and it’s going to be tight, and we’re going to be up late.”

This made a little more sense when Sarah Palin uttered the same guarantee last week. After all, she was in Beaver County, PA, home to Joe Namath, whose 1969 Super Bowl victory “guarantee” was an almost mandatory local reference.
Presumably, these candidates are trying to keep their supporters from despairing at the general signs (phony claims of “tightening race” notwithstanding) that Barack Obama is cruising towards a comfortable if not necessarily overwhelming win next Tuesday. Perhaps it will help build a floor under their vote levels and keep things respectable both at the top of and down the ballot. But there’s only so much that can be accomplished by enthusiasm and optimism. McCain-Palin supporters only get to vote once. And it’s likely there just aren’t enough of them to redeem McCain and Palin’s efforts at rhetorical enchantment.

Earlier this month, I did a post recounting all the reasons it was exceedingly weird to find John McCain doing a campaign appearance in Iowa.
Now, more than two weeks later, with the McCain campaign having told reporters that Iowa is already lost, and with its efforts now being focused on PA, VA, NC, IN, FL, and maybe NH, guess what? Both John McCain and Sarah Palin are going to spend time in Iowa this weekend.
The only thing that’s changed in the last couple of weeks is that the one polling outfit that failed to show Obama ahead in Iowa at any point during the entire year–the Big Ten Battleground consortium–now shows Obama up by 13 points. The RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls for the last month has Obama up by 12.5 points, and comfortably over 50%.
The irony is that if McCain had shown anything like this sort of stubborn interest in Iowa during the Caucus seasons of 2000 and 2008, he might well be in a position to win the state.
But hey, I’m sure the one person who’s happy about this is Sarah Palin, who may be getting a head start on her 2012 Iowa Caucus campaign.

One of the small but potentially important facts about this year’s election cycle is that Georgia requires general election candidates to receive 50%-plus-one of the vote, or the two two finishers must face off in a runoff four weeks after Election Day. With polls showing incumbent GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss in a very close race with Democrat Jim Martin, there’s already speculation in the Peach State that minor-party voting (mainly the Libertarians) could deny either candidate a majority, setting up a runoff for December 2.
From past experience in Lousiana, where post-general-election runoffs are very common, a December Georgia Senate runoff would attract vast amounts of unexpended party and campaign cash, not to mention the attentions of tens of thousands of staffers and volunteers who will be undergoing campaign withdrawal as of November 5. If the fate of Georgia’s seat happens to determine whether Democrats get a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate, then you could expect the runoff to be a huge deal in national politics, sort of a condensed reprise of the entire election cycle.
Georgia’s had one general-election runoff for a Senate seat in recent years: in 1992, when Republican Paul Coverdell knocked Democratic incumbent Wyche Fowler into a runoff, and then beat him as turnout declined by nearly half (the avoid-the-runoff threshold was soon lowered to 45% by a Democratic controlled state legislature, but was then restored to 50% after GOPers took over the statehouse).
The CW has always been the Republicans have a built-in advantage in stand-alone runoffs thanks to a more affluent and motivated voting base, and usually a sizable money advantage. That may not be the case this year, even in relatively conservative Georgia; the national resources available to a Democrat in such a scenario would certainly be formidable.
Jim Martin (a candidate virtually no one expected to be competitive as recently as a month ago) could save everybody a lot of trouble by beating Saxby Chambliss on November 4 with more than 50% of the vote. Martin has certainly earned a break: two years ago he planned a well-financed and -organized campaign for Lieutenant Governor on the assumption that he’d be facing Ralph Reed, and then Ralph screwed things up by losing his primary. But if both Martin and Chambliss fall a bit short, then hordes of political activists from both parties can start planning on spending Thanksgiving Weekend in Georgia.

The determination of Republicans to get racially-inflected themes embedded in the minds of voters in the home stretch of this presidential campaign is truly impressive. The latest example is the noise being made by the McCain campaign about Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s restoration of voting rights to a small number of non-violent felons.
Here’s the Washington Post‘s report on the saga:

On Thursday, the McCain campaign accused Kaine (D), a co-chairman of Obama’s campaign, of restoring voting rights for almost 1,500 felons in an effort to help Obama win Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.
“This is a question of judgment,” said Trey Walker, McCain’s mid-Atlantic regional campaign manager. “Senator Obama and Governor Kaine have assembled a felonious coalition of attempted murderers, kidnappers, rapists, armed robbers and wife beaters in order to win Virginia. This dangerous lack of judgment has no place in the White House.”

The lies here are pretty amazing by any standard. Virginia actually has the strictest standards in the nation for restoration of voting rights by non-violent felons; it’s one of just two states (the other is Kentucky) that permanently disenfranchise all felons, violent or non-violent, with action by the governor being necessary to restore rights. And note the word “non-violent” in terms of Kaine’s actions: Virginia isn’t restoring rights for “attempted murderers, kidnappers, rapists, armed robbers and wife beaters,” as McCain’s flack knows full well.
On top of everything else, all Kaine is doing is restoring the right to register to vote. Some may not exercise it, and there’s no guarantee all of them would vote for Barack Obama. If this was somehow a big part of the Obama effort in Virginia, it would obviously be a whole lot bigger, since as much as one-quarter of the state’s African-American men suffer from permanent disenfranchisement. There’s no question that a sizable percentage of these men would be automatically entitled to vote if they lived in virtually any other state. And in one state–Republican-governed Florida–that like Virginia, requires an application to the Governor, 123,000 non-violent felons have had their voting rights restored since April of last year. By my calculation, that’s about 83 times the number of restorations in Virginia this year.
The fishiest thing about this “story” is why it’s coming up in the final phases of the presidential campaign. The Washington Times published an inflammatory article on this subject three weeks ago, and the McCain campaign refused to comment on it. Now they are out there pushing it hard, as polls consistently show the Republican trailing Obama in Virginia. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The latest data point being seized on by conservatives to support the idea that the presidential race is “tightening” is yesterday’s results for the Investors Business Daily/TIPP national tracking poll, which had Obama’s lead down to 1.1%. This is supposed to be especially important because IBD/TIPP came closest to predicting the 2004 results.
Nate Silver, bless his pointy little head, noticed a really bizarre internal finding in that poll: it showed McCain beating Obama by a 74-22 margin among 18-24 year-old voters. He proceeds to blow up the whole survey:

Suppose that the true distribution of the 18-24 year old vote is a 15-point edge for Obama. This is a very conservative estimate; most pollsters show a gap of anywhere from 20-35 points among this age range.
About 9.3 percent of the electorate was between age 18-24 in 2004. Let’s assume that the percentage is also 9.3 percent this year. Again, this is a highly conservative estimate. The IBD/TIPP poll has a sample size of 1,060 likely voters, which would imply that about 98 of those voters are in the 18-24 age range.
What are the odds, given the parameters above, that a random sampling of 98 voters aged 18-24would distribute themselves 74% to McCain and 22% to Obama?
Using a binomial distribution, the odds are 54,604,929,633-to-1 against. That is, about 55 billion to one.
So, there is an 0.000000002% chance that IBD/TIPP just got really unlucky. Conversely, there is a 99.999999998% chance that one of the following things is true:
(i) They’re massively undersampling the youth vote. If you only have, say, 30 young voters when you should have 100 or so in your sample, than the odds of a freak occurrence like this are significantly more likely.
-or-
(ii) Something is dramatically wrong with their sampling or weighting procedures, or their likely voter model.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, a huge batch of new state polls yesterday gave John McCain what Silver called his worst polling day of the year.

The Economist has a heart-warming (for Dems) cartoon depicting elephants bailing out of a sinking GOP ship and swimming toward a ship bearing an “Obama ’08” campaign flag, as pleasantly surprised donkeys watch them scramble on board. The accompanying article, “The Rise of the Obamacons,” notes:

The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended “war on terror”, and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights. There are two competing “libertarians for Obama” web sites. CaféPress is even offering a “libertarian for Obama” lawn sign for $19.95. Larry Hunter, who helped to devise Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, thinks that Mr Obama can free America from the grip of the “zombies” who now run the Republican Party.

The Economist article goes on to cite a recent WaPo/ABC News poll indicating Obama is winning 22 percent of self-described conservatives, “a higher proportion than any Democratic nominee since 1980” and calls the roll of the more recent conservative intellectuals endorsing Obama, including General Powell, Francis Fukuyama, Christopher Buckley, Douglas Kmiec and Kenneth Adelman. (See Ed Kilgore’s Oct. 14 TDS post on the Buckley endorsement of Obama for a longer list)
The Economist article also does a good job of probing the “why” of the exodus of conservative intellectuals:

For many conservatives, Mr Obama embodies qualities that their party has abandoned: pragmatism, competence and respect for the head rather than the heart. Mr Obama’s calm and collected response to the turmoil on Wall Street contrasted sharply with Mr McCain’s grandstanding.
Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. His story also appeals to conservatives: it holds the possibility of freeing America from its racial demons, proving that the country is a race-blind meritocracy…

I doubt that the smarter conservatives believe an Obama presidency will “free America from its racial demons,” but I do believe that they like the fact that Senator and Mrs. Obama achieved so much without affirmative action.
But the larger lesson of the ‘Obamacons’ may be that temperament and style of leadership can trump policy. Many of these same conservatives believe that Obama is one of the more liberal members of the Senate. But they like his prudence and deliberate manner of decision-making. True conservatives also respect competence, and it’s not hard to imagine them wincing painfully at the McCain campaign’s blunder of the day. The McCain campaign’s Keystone Kops routine has made it embrarrassing for many conservatives to wear his campaign button, while Obama continues to make impressive gains on a daily basis.
There is a lesson here for Democrats, that it is possible to win the support of thinking conservatives without compromising unduly on progressive reforms. Yes, it helps a lot to have blundering adversaries, but dems would do well to remember the conservative exodus of ’08 and the way Obama handled himself to help make it happen.

The constant campaign of innuendo suggesting that Barack Obama is some sort of Muslim is well known, and only credible to, well, the extremely credulous. But the other smear-word being aimed at Obama is right out in the open, launched by all sorts of respectable conservatives, and is just as crazy from any objective point of view as the suggestion that the Democratic nominee secretly prays five times a day while facing Mecca: Obama is a socialist!
Google “Obama socialist” and you get 3.6 million links. Blogsearch the same term for a much smaller universe and you get 13,000 links in the last week, and more than two thousand in the last day. Both John McCain and Sarah Palin have used the word “socialism” to describe Obama’s fiscal policies, albeit through fond references to the assessments of their buddy Joe (sic!) the Plumber (sic!).
I’ve been around a while, and can’t recall any other Democratic presidential nominee being tarred with the S-word very often, outside the truly far-right fever swamps. “Liberal,” sure. “Ultra-liberal,” sure. Even “leftist,” sure. But unlike those L-words, “socialism” connotes a pretty specific set of views, mainly involving public ownership of the means of production.
What has Obama said to merit this sudden and massive effusion of red-baiting? His fiscal proposals, the main occasion for all the S-word slinging, basically amount to returning top tax rates to where they were during the Clinton administration. Nobody much called the Big Dog a “socialist,” as opposed to all the others terms of abuse he endured. And the top tax rates proposed by Obama would be a lot lower than they were during the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford. Yes, the John Birch Society called Ike a communist, but that wasn’t a very common view (conservative intellectual Russell Kirk said: “Ike’s not a communist. He’s a golfer.”).
How’s about Obama’s “socialized medicine” health care proposal? Does that earn him the S-word? C’mon. Surely any socialist worth his salt would propose, as an absolute minimum, a government-run single-payer health care system like that operating in Canada and (in one form or another) Europe. Not Barack Obama, who insists on maintaining private health insurance and consumer choice as the backbone of his plan for universal health coverage.
Since Obama hasn’t proposed nationalizing any major (or minor) industries, and is relying on a resolutely centrist economic policy team, the “socialist” label is, well, simply bizarre, unless the word has no real meaning.
But if there’s anything more incredible than calling Obama a “Muslim” or a “socialist,” it’s calling him a “Muslim socialist,” as a local Republican leader in New Mexico did this week. (It’s not an unusual charge; it was recently hurled directly at Obama by voters in North Carolina, who probably didn’t come up with it by themselves).
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in religion or Middle Eastern Affairs to become at least dimly aware that Islam and socialism are not terribly compatible. And this is particularly true of Jihadist strains of Islam. Al-Qaeda, you may recall, was basically born in the struggle of jihadist against “atheistic communists” in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, were all developed in violent opposition to secular-leaning socialists in the Muslim world, particularly in Egypt and Palestine. There are rich traditions of Christian socialism and of Jewish socialism, to be sure. But not so much Islamic socialism.
So make up your minds, Obama-haters. There’s not any real evidence to support any of your smears, but if you must use them, pick one and stick with it.

Well, here we are twelve days from the general elections, and only now is the political world focusing on the high likelihood of voter supression shananigans. It would have been nice if the persistence of these tactics had led to national legislation to deal with the national problem of wildly varying, arbitrary, and partisan election administration.
A New York Times editorial on voter-list purges and other voter suppression tactics starkly exposed the situation:

Congress and the states need to develop clear and accurate rules for purges and new-voter verification that ensure that eligible voters remain on the rolls — and make it much harder for partisans to game the system. These rules should be public, and voters who are disqualified should be notified and given ample time before Election Day to reverse the decision.
For this election, voters need to be prepared to fight for their right to cast a ballot. They should try to confirm before Nov. 4 that they are on the rolls — something that in many states can be done on a secretary of state or board of elections Web site. If their state permits it, they should vote early. Any voter who finds that their name has disappeared from the rolls will then have time to challenge mistakes.

Americans shouldn’t have to “fight for their right to cast a ballot.” And we can only hope that after this election, finally, the next president and Congress get serious about election reform.