Ah yes, it’s finally Election Day, when the only poll that really matters is the one in which voters actually vote. And unlike some recent elections, we’ll probably know most of what we need to know nationally well before midnight. That’s because so many of the key House and Senate races are in the eastern and central time zones. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post‘s “The Fix” political blog has posed a very nifty “viewer’s guide” for tonight that identifies, by poll closing times, the races that will pretty much indicate how well Democrats will ultimately do. In addition to the possibility of an early night, it’s also clear political junkies will have to get a life before the polls close as well. In reaction to the exit poll debacle of 2004, The Powers That Be in the news media are swearing that the handful of network analysts who will have access to exit poll data during the day will be locked in a room, stripped of their blackberries and cell phones, until 5:00 p.m. EST, at which point they will be allowed to speak to their employers. Maybe leaks will occur shortly thereafter, but the odds are that no reliable data will be out there until the nets make their calls. Pollster.com has the full story, and more about exit polling, here. I’ll be posting randomly during the day and night, for those who want a change of pace from the tube or the big political sites.

About three weeks ago, Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris called me with an interesting proposed writing assignment: pretend it’s the day after the elections, and you’re writing an op-ed for a major newspaper advising your party’s leaders about what to do now. But here was the twist: write two of these fictional op-eds, one based on the presumption that Democrats will take over both Houses of Congress, and the other based on the opposite proposition that GOPers shock the world and maintain control of both Houses. Glastris approached some other folks with a similar offer, and it’s all up on the Monthly‘s site now. In the end, Mark Schmitt and I were the only ones who wrote the op-eds both ways. But the package has Tom Daschle, Daniel Levy, David Gergen, and Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein addressing the day-after realities of a Democratic win, while Dick Armey and David Greenberg write up an unlikely GOP victory. The title the Monthly gave my “Dems win” piece–“Kick ‘Em While They’re Down”–is a little misleading, but I like it. Check it all out as you get out the vote, with fingers crossed.

It’s t’wo days til Election Day 2006, and there’s a lot of nervousness out there about how things will break at the very last minute. Yes, it’s hard to find much of anybody, even in GOP circles, who doesn’t think Democrats will retake the House. But today, a new Washington Post/ABC poll has the Democratic generic ballot advantage dropping to 6 points. And Mason-Dixon has dropped a batch of new Senate polls showing Chafee up in RI, Corker romping in TN, Burns drawing even with Tester in MT, and Steele within 3 of Cardin in MD. Tomorrow, of course, may bring other polls that contradict this latest burst of semi-cheer for the GOP (I know Markos is a big fan of Mason-Dixon’s accuracy, but I’ve always suspected them of a fairly heavy thumb on the scales for Republicans), but today’s buzz is illustrative of a general uncertainty about what will really matter at the very end. I suspect a lot of this is derived from (a) the unexpected tilt of last-minute trends in the last two midterm elections, (b) the confounding two years ago of the common assumption that undecided voters break against incumbents in stormy weather, and (c) the mythology that has developed around the GOP’s 72 Hours get-out-the-vote system. Add in to these factors the remote possibility, being trumpted by hopeful Republicans, that the Saddam verdict and sentence–or even less credibly, the Kerry furor of last week–has had a significantly positive effect on conservative base turnout.The final factor, of course, is the infamous “horse-race” psychology of the political chattering classes, who love close elections and thus tend to promote them. I don’t know if Democrats will take the House narrowly or massively, or take the Senate at all, but I do know you will have to get pretty deep into the expectations game to view any likely result on Tuesday as anything less than a Democratic triumph. Not that long ago, the CW was that gerrymandering made any Democratic takeover of the House almost impossible until 2012, and that the red-state/blue-state divide guaranteed virtually perpetual Republican control of the Senate and of most state governments. No matter what happens, Democrats will defy those expectations on Tuesday.

In all the flurry of last-minute polls, ads and talking points, one of the most interesting Signs of the Times of this midterm election is the highly selective deployment of the President of the United States. Not wanted in many competitive states and districts, and following the Rovian strategy of energizing a very dispirited conservative GOP base, Bush is going into very red territory and nowhere else: Georgia, Texas, Kansas, Montana, Nevada. This is reminiscent of the limitations experienced more than thirty years ago, heading into the very similar 1974 elections, when, before his resignation, Richard M. Nixon wasn’t wanted much of anywhere. Indeed, in Kansas that year, when Sen. Bob Dole was embroiled in a very tight race, he was asked if he wanted the President to appear in the state for him. “I wouldn’t mind if he flew over Kansas,” quoth Dole. Actually, Nixon spent a good part of early 1974 flying around the world to places where locals could be counted on to show up in large numbers to cheer him and wave American flags. This is obviously not an option for George W. Bush. Republicans are clearly back on their heels going into Tuesday’s elections. George W. Bush is a negative factor for the GOP nationally, and I doubt he’s going to have much magic for candidates even in the reddest of red states.

Lost amidst the manufactured outrage over John Kerry’s study-hard-or-go-to-Iraq line has been the genuine outrage that Americans ought to feel about the president’s and vice president’s coordinated message two days ago that essentially said a vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorism.It’s odd: the Washington Post played up this story in a banner front-page headline, but it hardly got picked up anywhere else in the major mainstream media. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see the explosion of anger in the progressive blogosphere that I expected, either. Indeed, about the only sharp reaction I saw was from the Democratic Leadership Council, whose New Dem Dispatch tore Bush and Cheney new ones for arguing that their national security failures meant that American voters had lost their right to hold them accountable for their vast series of mistakes.Here’s a sample of the DLC take:

After botching the Iraq War about as thoroughly as possible, and refusing to admit errors, change strategies or hold anyone responsible for their incompetence, the Bush administration is now arguing that the American people don’t have the right to hold them responsible, either, since a Democratic victory would cheer terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. In effect, Bush and Cheney are trying to hold America hostage to their own mistakes.This breathtaking line of “reasoning” is all the more deplorable because it expresses a sense of complete U.S. helplessness in the struggle against jihadist terrorists. We can’t change direction because that would be a victory for our enemies. So they effectively control us. Given the administration’s obsession with denying there are any practical restraints on U.S. freedom of action in Iraq or anywhere else, that’s an especially ironic point of view.

Check it out and pass it on. As Michael Crowley observed over at The Plank, Kerry may have bungled a joke, but Bush bungled a war. And that’s why the gleeful right-wing assault on Kerry may backfire: it reminds voters of the issue on which they have already decided to repudiate the administration and the GOP. In the end, the joke may be on Republicans.

I found today’s weirdest news on the National Review Corner site (via Kos):

Harrisburg – During a radio interview late yesterday in Harrisburg, former Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) formally kicked off Democrats for Santorum, a statewide coalition of Democrats dedicated to Senator Santorum’s reelection effort. Over 7,000 members strong, Democrats for Santorum is a coalition of Pennsylvanians who share Senator Santorum’s commitment to national security, lower taxes, and less government regulation.

You can just feel the excitement, eh?In case you haven’t been following the Santorum-Casey race, the junior senator from PA, who had been mulling a presidential run, is tanking really badly. By all accounts, he’s been left for dead by national GOPers. But to read this press release, you’d think he was boldly picking up vast Democratic support en route to a smashing victory. You have to wonder why the Santorum campaign thinks flying in Zell Miller, who is neither a Pennsylvanian nor a Democrat, to launch “Democrats for Santorum” is going to do any good. Maybe they’ve bought into the old jibe (often attributed to James Carville) that Pennsylvania is composed of two cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between (hence the sobriquet, “Pennsylbama” or “Pennsyltucky”).Miller’s decision to play this bizarre role in a losing effort is equally puzzling, but I’ve long given up trying to figure out my former boss’ recent behavior. Maybe he’s going through some sort of Robert E. Lee delusion, invading Pennsylvania only to suffer defeat at Gettysburg. His last high-profile political gig was his unsuccesful effort to get Georgia Republicans to nominate Ralph Reed for Lt. Governor. Ending the cycle by weighing in for another doomed Republican has the virtue of consistency, I suppose. While I cannot muster any sympathy for a nasty piece of work like Santorum, I do, however, appreciate the agonies of his staff, having been involved in a couple of campaigns over the years where the smell of death was everywhere during the home stretch. You know you’re going to lose, but you go through the motions: planning events, putting out press releases, spreading rumors of The Greatest Upset in History, lying to donors about that Last Ad Buy that will turn everything around (Santorum has one up right now that appears to suggest that North Korea will immediately launch a nuclear attack on the Keystone State on the first news of a Casey victory). So probably what happened is that some lowly staffer had been beavering away for weeks on a plan to launch a Democrats for Santorum group; suggested a Zell Miller appearance would get news; and the campaign brass, spending most of their time working on their resumes, thought: “Why the hell not? Couldn’t hurt.”And thus, I suspect, the supply and demand curves met, and a politician with nothing to do came in to “help” a politician with nothing to lose. Lord knows the Santorum campaign wouldn’t have done anything really crazy like invite George W. Bush to come in.

It’s been obvious for a while that a panicked Republican Party would get down and dirty in an effort to win a few close House and (especially) Senate races, and the GOP is definitely living down to that expectation. Aside from the tawdry crap they’ve been throwing at Harold Ford in Tennessee, we now have the ripe example of George Allen’s efforts to lift a few shocking sex scenes from Jim Webb’s war novels to paint him as some sort of mysoginistic pervert.I haven’t read the books in question, not being a big fan of war novels (The Caine Mutiny being the one exception). But my colleague The Moose has not only read a number of Webb’s novels, but is familiar with Webb’s rationale in writing them, and with the original conservative reaction to them.I know some of my regular readers are Moose-o-phobic, but I encourage you to read his latest post on this subject. He reminds us that (a) Webb wrote his novels in no small part to provide a grunts-eye-view of the Vietnam War to a generation of peers who were in the habit of disparaging those who served; (b) conservative commentators generally gave these novels, “shocking” content and all, rave reviews when they actually appeared; and (c) Webb is an authentic war hero whose own service, and his searing accounts of what it entailed, should command great respect, particularly from an ostensibly pro-military GOP.Beyond that, there’s something particularly disgusting about this sort of attack on Webb emanating from the campaign of George Allen.For one thing, Allen (like me) could have served in the Vietnam War, but didn’t, getting past it on a student deferment. As an enthusiast for the war in Iraq, and contributor to the argument that Democrats generally and Webb in particular are “weak on national security,” he has a special responsibility to steer clear of attacks on Webb for anything related to his rival’s war service.More fundamentally, Allen’s own background ought to make the implicit anti-intellectualism of his campaign’s attacks on Webb’s fiction truly objectionable.I know the conventional wisdom is that the revelations about Allen that have emerged during the current campaign turn on his alleged racism, dating from his peculiar obsession with the Confederacy during his high school years in Southern California. That’s all true.But I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they’d also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a ‘bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.It’s also illustrative that when Allen decided to relocate himself to his vicarious southern homeland, he chose to attend the University of Virginia. Having lived near Charlottesville off and on for a good while, I can personally verify what anyone familiar with The University would say: this is a place where anyone affecting a Yahoo world view–much less the Yankee son of a national celebrity with a French mother–would stand out like a sore thumb. UVa is arguably one of the two or three best public universities in America, but it’s also arguably one of the two or three snootiest public universities in America. Whether or not George Allen routinely used the “n-word” while at UVa, or pulled Klan-style “pranks” on black residents of Louisa County, there’s no question his whole pick-up-truck, Dixified persona in Charlottesville was weird on every level. And in many respects, Allen has remained, ever since college, the Wahoo Yahoo–the guy who perpetually combines inherited privilege with a willful determination to refute it by aping what he understands to be the culture of “real people.”By now, I assume many of you are thinking that the Allen Story closely resembles the Story of the President of the United States, on a smaller scale of privilege and pretense. And you’re right: George Allen is sort of a George Bush Mini-Me. No wonder he was the early favorite for ’08 among many Bush loyalists who can’t abide John McCain.And the parallels and ironies extend to the current campaign. Remember that moment in 2004 when the Bushies went after John Kerry for his goose-hunting photo op, supposedly exposing him as a uppercrust quiche-eater pretending to be a Real Guy? Well, George Allen has spent much of his adult life as an uppercrust quiche-eater longing to appear to be a Real Guy–and not a particularly admirable Real Guy at that–without Kerry’s history as a war hero and genuine outdoorsman. He even shares Kerry’s odd experience in learning on the campaign trail that he had a hitherto unknown Jewish ancestry. I don’t recall that Kerry responded to this thunderbolt like Allen, who immediately started talking about his abiding affection for pork products.Have any of the Republicans encouraging Allen’s smear campaign on Webb mocked the Wahoo Yahoo like they mocked Kerry? Of course not.Allen’s bigger twin, George W. Bush, is probably capable of the sort of anti-intellectual assault that his Mini-Me has launched on Jim Webb. But at least W. has hired a few smart people over the years, most notably the brilliant wordsmith Mike Gerson, who have helped him pay lip service to the idea that national leaders ought to take ideas seriously. If George Allen has ever exhibited interest in a political discourse more advanced than the endless repetition of football metaphors, I’ve somehow missed it.That’s why Allen’s latest gambit, in the end, is so nauseating. I don’t like to throw around Nazi analogies; they tend to devalue the unique nature of the Third Reich, and also ignore the abiding civilized values that unite both parties and most Americans, no matter how much and how vociferouly we disagree on this or that topic. But everything about George Allen’s effort to beat Jim Webb by quoting stupidly from his novels is reminiscent of the quote often attributed to Herman Goering: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”Allen’s ad attack on Webb’s novels represents the Wahoo Yahoo’s willingness to look the cultural products of a war hero and genuine cultural conservative right in the face, and reach for his gun.I hope and pray Virginians vote for the real representative of their values, and not the cynical pretender whose abasement of those values is best illustrated by how he has chosen to save his political hide.

The gubernatorial and Senate campaigns in Maryland this year are presenting a nice example of one of the major subthemes of Election 2006: the overwhelming price that Blue State Republicans are finally paying for the sins of their national party. Maryland GOPers went into the home stretch of this general election feeling pretty good about their prospects. Incumbent Gov. Bob Erlich had relatively high approval ratings, huge sacks of cash with which to impugn the mayoral record of Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley, and a reputation for closing well, given his upset win over Kathleen Kennedy Townsend four years ago. Their Senate nominee, Michael Steele, was perfectly positioned to exploit African-American disappointment with Kweisi Mfume’s Democratic primary loss to Ben Cardin. Steele was also running some of the best ads of the cycle, and doing everything imaginable to distance himself from George W. Bush. A new Washington Post poll of Maryland just out today indicates none of that much matters. Among likely voters, the poll has O’Malley up over Ehrlich 55-45, and Cardin up over Steele 54-43. Almost nobody appears to be undecided, though 15% of voters said they could change their minds. (This led Republicans to challenge the poll’s methodology, though the Post has a track record of very conservative polling techniques, and a low undecided count is not unusual in nationalized midterm elections with well-known candidates). The internals of the Post poll show that a lot of Maryland Democratic moderate voters that Democrats lost in 2002 are returning to the Donkey Ticket, and that Steele is not making much headway at all among African-Americans. There are other polls out there showing both races as closer, but the Post’s relatively large sample and good reputation makes me think this poll is probably spot-on. And given Erlich and Steele’s strengths, this is yet another bad sign for the GOP heading towards November 7. The Republican wave of 1994 depended in no small part on the inability of southern and western Democrats, however well-tailored for their states and districts, to separate themselves from a national party that had lost credibility with local voters. The same thing seems to be happening to Republicans in the northeast and midwest this year.

Struggling to find some political purchase between now and November 7, Republicans from George Bush on down are rushing towards hysteria in response to a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that would require state recognition of legal benefits for same-sex couples. The decision pointedly did not mandate gay marriage rights; indeed, the majority opinion went out of its way to say that’s a question for the state legislature. But nevermind. Campaigning in Iowa, Bush said: ““Yesterday in New Jersey, we had another activist court issue a ruling that raises doubts about the institution of marriage.”GOPers no doubt hope the renewed specter of gay marriage will bestir social conservatives to forget about their many grievances with the Bush adminisrtration and the Republican Congress–not to mention the negative feelings they share with Democrats and independents about the corrupto-ganza in Washington and the mess in Iraq–and dutifully troops to the polls to save the bacon of many an endangered incumbent. More specifically, Republicans think the issue could now help them in two of the three states on which control of the Senate likely hangs–Tennessee and Virginia–where gay marriage constitutional bans are on the ballot.I’m guessing that the fine folks at the RNC are particularly happy with themselves for anticipating the New Jersey decision by lying about Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford’s position on gay marriage. Ford is now having to spend time and money in ads making it clear he opposes gay marriage–and in fact, has said he’d vote for the state ban.It will be interesting to see if social conservatives fish in one more time in the murky waters of the GOP’s tired efforts to exploit cultural fears over the bogus issue of gay marriage. Aside from their well-earned skepticism of empty Republican promises to turn back the clock on gay and lesbian rights, Christian conservatives are no more enamored of the general Bush record than most other voters. The latest drive to make gay marriage a national political issue is a classic example of trying to pour old wine into old bottles. It’s a very sour wine at this point, and I’m hoping it finds no buyers.

For all the talk over the last decade about the political importance of fast-growing suburbs and exurbs, there’s been another story that has often been missed: steady Republican gains in rural and small-town (or micropolitan) America. While rural areas have often continued to lose population, and small towns, overall, have shown little growth, the percentage of the vote given to the GOP in non-metro America has steadily risen. As a new survey done for the Center for Rural Strategies by Anna Greenberg, David Walker and William Greener shows, that trend appears to be reversing itself this year. In 2000, George W. Bush carried rural America by 16 percentage points; his margin increased to 19 percent in 2004. In the new survey, Democrats are leading Republicans among rural voters by 13 points in 41 highly competitive House districts, and by four points in six states with close Senate races. Both findings show a significant trend towards Democrats over the last month. Democratic gains, moreover, are coming mainly from independent and moderate voters. Greener, a Republican pollster, said of this survey: “The numbers in this poll have to be disturbing to any Republican involved in the upcoming election.” And Center for Rural Strategies president Dee Davis noted that the current trends among rural voters resembled those that immediately preceded the elections of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992.If countrified voters are abandoning the GOP this year, then Republicans may truly be country fried on election day.