Yes, everyone know that younger voters are part of Barack Obama’s electoral “base,” but it’s sometimes hard to grasp the sheer magnitude of Obama’s popularity among “millenials.” A new survey by USA Today/MTV and Gallup helps.
Here’s the bottom line, from Susan Page:

A USA TODAY/MTV/Gallup Poll of registered voters 18 to 29 years old shows Democrat Barack Obama leading Republican John McCain by 61%-32%, the most lopsided contest within an age group in any presidential election in modern times.

“Modern times” means since 1976, when publicly released exit polling began. John Kerry won under-30 voters by an 11 point margin. In case you’re bad at arithmetic, Obama’s margin in this new survey is 29%.
Clearly, John McCain’s problems with young voters weren’t helped by his selection of 44-year-old Sarah Palin–the youngest candidate on either ticket–as his running-mate. In the new survey, Palin’s favorable-unfavorable rating is 25/46 (McCain’s is 43/45; Obama’s is 71/23; and Biden’s is 43/35), and 55% of these under-30 voters think Palin’s not qualified to become president.
The size of the under-30 vote will, of course, determine its value to Obama. In the Democratic primaries, the percentage of the overall vote cast by under-30 voters nearly doubled from 2000, the last year with competitive primaries. The new voter registration numbers are certainly impressive: In Virginia, for example, which Bush won by 260,000 votes in 2004, there are more than 300,000 new voters on the rolls, and 41% of them are under 25.

As you probably know by now, the House passed the revised financial bailout–excuse me! rescue–bill today by a surprisingly large 263-171 margin. Dems voted for it 172-63, while Republicans still rejected it, though by a smaller margin than before, 91-108. That means 32 Democrats and 26 Republicans flipped.
Looking at the results, which showed a very diverse and sufficient number of Democrats getting behind the bailout, you do have to wonder if a Dems-only strategy might have worked, at least in the House. A clear majority of House flippers were from the Progressive Caucus and (especially) the Congressional Black Caucus ranks, and those Blue Dogs (four by a quick count) who flipped despite the budget-busting Senate tax sweeteners, and perhaps a few others, might well have gone for a fiscally sound progressive alternative. Maybe such an alternative would have never gotten through the Senate, but you do have to consider the road not taken.

As you undoubtedly know, the financial bailout bill passed the Senate last night by a big margin–74-25, to be exact. And few of the dynamics evident in the House vote appeared there.
For one thing, the partisan splits were a lot closer, with Democrats favoring the bill 39-10, and Republicans by 34-15 (as a matter of principle, Joe Lieberman is not being counted as a Democrat here). For another, election-year pressures weren’t a big factor: Senators up for re-election split 24-9 in favor of the legislation, perhaps in part reflecting the fact that public opinion has shifted noticeably, if not definitively, since the House vote.
The House is due to vote on the revised bill Friday, with the current odds favoring passage thanks to the tax sweeteners added by the Senate, not to mention the buyer’s remorse among Members who voted against the original bill assuming it would pass anyway.

As the U.S. Senate today seeks to put the Humpty-Dumpty of the financial bailout back together again, John McCain’s getting a lot of advice from “nervous” Republicans, according to a piece by the Politico’s Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin. And that advice is: change the subject! Get away from all this “substantive” stuff and attack Obama!

Several state GOP chairmen in interviews urged the McCain campaign to be more aggressive in hitting Obama’s vulnerabilities, such as his past relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other problematic associations from Chicago….
Among those goading McCain to be more aggressive is Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Robin Smith, who said that “people need to see a gladiator who’s willing to defend what exactly he stands for.”
“We’re not talking, for instance, about the radical associations that Barack Obama has, with Mr. Ayers, Tony Rezko and so on,” Smith said. “More could be done.”
Murray Clark, the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, said he is eager for Obama’s “troubling relationships” to be aired in his state. “I think those things will come up in Indiana again and they do have an impact on mainstream voters in Indiana. You call it going negative, [but] whoever … is in a position to point out these relationships, I think it’s helpful.”

What’s happened is that the Real World has interrupted the efforts of the McCain campaign to frame the electoral contest as a choice between “mavericks” focused on doubts and fears about his opponent:

McCain’s first signs of life only came after his campaign mocked Obama as a celebrity and sought to make the best of a race that had increasingly been defined by the Illinois Democrat. Then, thanks in part to Palin, McCain pulled even or took a lead in some polls after a convention that savaged Obama and featured only a brief video from President Bush and no appearance at all by Vice President Cheney.
Now, with the financial crisis front and center, Bush has reappeared on the landscape and the race is no longer an Obama referendum.

It’s hard to see how McCain will be able to distract attention from real-world problems with so little time remaining before November 4. But many Republicans clearly think it’s his only hope for victory.

Today will be another crazy day in Washington and on Wall Street, as the House prepares for what everyone expects to be a close vote on the financial bailout deal put together over the weekend.
The bailout legislation survived a close procedural vote in the House this morning, but that may not be a true measure of how many Members will ultimately vote “no.” The bill remains vulnerable among Democrats on grounds that it represents armed-robbery-by-extortion; among Republicans who are hearing from conservative activists that it’s all socialism; and among politically vulnerable incumbents in both parties who naturally want to vote against it without actually suffering the consequences of finding out what would happen if it fails.
Prospects for the passage of the legislation aren’t being helped by the negative reactions of the market this morning, which seem to be less about fears that it will be defeated than about disappointment that the bailout won’t be as fast and as large as originally advertised by Paulson. Why rush to the rescue when the rescuee is already complaining?

The very funny (if not always family-friendly) sports blog Every Day Should Be Saturday has a fake wire story up entitled: “Feds call for 38 point bailout of USC,” suggesting that a retroactive allocation of points to the once-invincible Southern Cal Trojans is necessary to stabilize college football after last night’s shocking loss to Oregon State. There’s lots of hilarious stuff in the comments thread, too, about the costs and moral hazards involved, including a particularly incoherent take from someone posting as “Sarah Palin.”
Given the vast and ancient prevalence of sports metaphors in politics, it’s appropriate to run the metaphors in the other direction now and then.

Over at The Nation, Chris Hayes very nicely sums up the perspective of many individual members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, towards the bailout negotiations:

1) The bailout is unpopular: The polling on this is muddled, but the polling is completely dependent on the wording. Every single lawmaker is getting barraged with hundreds of calls a day from constituents, and no one is saying: “Please give lots of money to Wall Street!”
2) The crisis is terrifying to lawmakers: They’re getting insanely heavy pressure from the vulturous Wall St lobbyists buzzing around the Hill (“there’s a gazillion of ’em!” a staffer told me earlier in the week) and also, dire and sober warnings from Bernanke and Paulson behind closed doors. Basically, if you don’t pass this, they’re being told, you’ll have the blood of another Great Depression on your hands.
3) Ergo: The optimal outcome for all lawmkers is to vote against the bill and still have it pass. That way you get to have your cake and eat it, too. But what we’re dealing with is something akin to a massive prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone wants to get into the decision quadrant of voting against the bill and having it pass, but of course if everyone rushes for that quadrant, then the bill doesn’t pass and therefore, no one ends up in that quadrant. If you’re Pelosi and the Democrats you can’t allow the Republican wingnuts off the hook by creating the space for them to crowd into the sweet spot, and then use the bill to run against you. That’s why things are so tenuous and difficult to game out.

This is pretty much what Ed Kilgore was warning about earlier this week. If the bailout passes, the consequences will be bad and very tangible, particularly since nobody’s under the illusion that a bailout will prevent a recession. Nobody knows how much worse things would actually get if the bailout fails. So if it does pass, you definitely want to be recorded as voting against it, particularly if you are vulnerable Republican.
The “prisoner’s dilemma” Chris refers to is a famous game theory conundrum in which it will always be in the selfish interest of one accomplice to a crime to betray the other, even though cooperation would produce a better overall result.

When John McCain got his post-Convention “bounce,” many political observers said that Barack Obama’s most urgent challenge was to get public attention refocused on the economy.
Well, external events have taken care of that issue, and it’s not surprising that Obama’s doing better in both national and state polls since the financial meltdown began. But today’s new Washington Post/ABC poll provides at least one data point for the proposition that the presidential race has shifted significantly.
The poll has Obama up over McCain by a 52-43 margin among likely voters. The last Post/ABC poll, conducted on September 5-7, had McCain up 47-45. And the explanation of the shift is pretty simple: the percentage of voters calling the economy the top issue has jumped from 37% to 50% in the last two weeks.
The McCain campaign quickly called the new poll an “outlier,” and that’s entirely possible, at least on the margins. But the Post/ABC polling operation has a pretty good reputation, and if anything, is usually thought to have a slight pro-Republican bias due to its relatively tight “screen” for likely voters. Moreover, as the Post‘s own analysis explains, neither of the last two Democratic nominees ever registered above the 50% mark in a Post poll.
The composition of Obama’s surge in this poll is interesting: he’s regained the lead among independents, and has pared McCain’s lead among white voters to five percent. And it’s primarily college-educated white voters who are moving to Obama: he leads McCain among them by nine percent, while trailing among non-college educated white voters by 17 percent. In other words, Obama’s building a lead based on the strengths he’s long exhibited (he leads among African-Americans by a 96-3 margin).
More ominously for McCain and other Republicans, Democrats have regained a double-digit advantage in party ID.
All in all, the poll’s results seem to reflect a shift in the fundamentals rather than a specific comparative judgment between the two candidates based on campaign activity. And that’s not too surprising, given the recent domination of the news by a heavy confirmation of the public’s long-standing pessimism about the economy, which has been a drag on Republican candidates since well before the 2006 midterm elections.
We’ll see what experts like Mark Blumenthal and Nate Silver have to say about this poll later today, but one thing’s clear: if the economy has indeed retilted the race to favor Obama, it won’t be easy for John McCain to tilt it back, since the odds of the economy looking good before Election Day stand at somewhere between slim and none. Yes, the debates will matter, and yes, external events will continue to have an impact. But right now, the economy is reasserting a powerful negative effect on the campaigns of anyone campaigning with an “R” next to the name on the ballot.

To call this week a pivotal moment in the presidential campaign, and perhaps even in U.S. history, is probably not much of an exaggeration. High-stakes wrangling in Congress over Treasury Secretary Paulson’s Wall Street stabilization plan will run around the clock, with elements of both parties threatening to kill it. The first presidential candidates’ debate occurs on Friday–planned, inconveniently, to focus on foreign policy. And early voting begins today in Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia, with some estimates suggesting that as much as a third of the national electorate will cast ballots before November 4.
It’s often said that winning campaigns are those who “play chess” while their opponents “play checkers.” But in this general election, in this peculiar climate, the winner may need to play three-dimensional chess.

If you don’t have enough to worry about with the financial meltdown, which has panicked Bush Administration figures into the most expensive bailout in U.S. history, you could consider the various warning signs about a potential electoral meltdown in November.
Mary Pat Flaherty has a useful roundup in the Washington Post today of the most obvious problems with rapidly changing voting systems encountering record numbers of new voters.
The bottom line, of course, is that we persist in allowing a highly decentralized, crazy-quilt system of electoral rules, procedures and “safeguards” dictated at the state and sometimes county levels of government. It was in 2000, and remains today, a recipe for disaster.