Just what we need. Clear, concise, direct.

One.

Two.

Three.

It's still a longshot that the Dems could actually win a senate seat in Kentucky, but the whacko incumbent Republican Jim Bunning continues making a fool of himself, and the race has tightened to six points.

That's close, for an incumbent, definitely reachable.

If you have not been following this story, it's hysterical. AP has a bland rehash, but it includes--and I'm not making this up, wild acusations that his his oponent had people beat his wife "black and blue" at a political picnic and that terrorists were following/targetting him. The story about his one debate is too long and strange to recount here.

And here's a recent one--comparatively mild, but very odd:

Most recently, he admitted he wasn't aware that a group of Army reservists had refused a convoy mission in Iraq, saying he watches only Fox News for information and hasn't read a newspaper in six weeks.

Let's just hope the people of KY step up and vote for sanity.

One of the big proponents of the vote-swapping in 2000 is urging Naderites to do it again this year, with a piece on Slate.

He and other lawyers have blunted the BS Republican threats about its illegality from four years ago.

For God's sake, if you live in a swing state--especially WI, MN, FL, IA, NM or OH--and want to vote for Nader, go to VotePair.org and get someone in a safe state to do it for you.

Well, after a big boost last week, Kerry has been slipping slightly in the Zogby poll, continuing today; now Bush 48%, Kerry 45%.

And Slate's update last night indicated a second poll from HI yesterday confirmed that Bush might be slightly ahead in that Dem stronghold, though another from barely-polled, assumed safely-Bush Arkansas showed the two tied.

And electoral-vote reports a raft of state polls today, all wildly conflicting, but not so good for us, though the site includes everything, undermining its mission pretty horribly. Today he writes, "I think there are serious problems with the all the polls." Duh. So why are you including them all indiscriminately?

(Maybe I should quit knocking him. Here's a guy doing an incredible amount of work, trying really hard to provide a great service. But he continues shooting himself in the foot. Great links, there, though. Hopefully in four years he will have figured it out.)

On a personal note, I was thrilled to see Zogby reporting Kerry ahead in Colorado. Seems hard to believe--I will remain skeptical on that one till I see at least a few confirmations--but it's exciting to actually live in a swing state this year. Especially if it swung the right way. Would be amazing to see my state turn blue that night. Hard to imagine Bush winning the country but losing Colorado.

But my impression from reading Slate each day is that the Zogby state polls are all automated and therefore unreliable--or at least untested. They also show Bush pulling back ahead in Ohio, which is much more important than CO. But I don't really trust any of those auto polls. Luckily, Slate will have the good sense to disregard them, so we'll have a clearer picture of the map later this morning when they post.

As far as I can tell, Slate is way out in front with the most reliable prediction map, with some real analysis involved on a state by state level to make a pretty objective call. (Except that they ignore the critical incumbent rule.) They do filter out the partisan polls on both sides, discount the automated ones and look for trends, going with a consensus of the most reliable, most recent info, instead of just blindly plugging in the numbers from the latest bogus poll.

They seem to update around noon eastern most days. It's a new link every day, and they're a bit late today, so I've linked to the main Slate page.

Here's the point. Don't panic.

We have some good days, we have some bad days. The polls have been zigzagging for the past week. It was trending up for Kerry last week, but not every day.

Dem supporters and Rep supporters this year are strikingly lik Red Sox fans and Yankee fans. The Daily Show had a great report from Bostonian Rob Courdrey after the Sox clinched the penant. He said he thought the Sox had a definite chance, not getting his hopes up yet. Jon Stewart interjected that it was over, the Yankees had lost, but Rob insisted that it was too soon, the Sox could still forfeit . . .

It's been that way all year. The Rs are absolutely certain Bush is going to win, and the Ds mostly dejected.

Come on, guys. An incumbent below 50% in most polls a week before the election. Any pollster will tell you that's a death sentence.

Job approval rankings, deserves-relection and right-track/wrong-track numbers considerably lower? These are the real indicators pollsters watch to predict results, and they are absolutely dismal for Bush. The numbers are truly horrible for him to anyone in the field. (Just not to simpletons in the press who only know how to subtract a pair of two-digit numbers.)

The overall outlook is great. Keep those spirits up, get your butt out there and help make it happen.

Update: Slate just posted the Monday update, though it doesn't appear updated yet. Follow this link, and it will probably be updated by the time you read this.

Update2:

OK, the Slate analysis is up and it's a little negative, but not too bad:

Analysis Oct. 25, 12:45 p.m. ET: New Mexico moves to Bush, bumping him up to 276. Now he has several winning combinations, none of which require Ohio. He can lose Iowa and still take the election to the House on a tie. He's more likely to lose Wisconsin than Iowa, but in that case, New Mexico plus New Hampshire or (can you believe this?) Hawaii gets him to 270. What Bush can't afford is a Colorado-New Mexico swap. Given the current map, we still think Wisconsin will decide the election. But there are many more variables in play today than a week ago.

They are not buying the outlier polls in either direction yet: on OH, CO, HI. Just NM, ouch. (Thank you thank you thank you, Slate people, for taking the time to sift through these polls and put your brains into the effort.)

Interesting that they see Wisconsin deciding it. I'm still betting on Florida. (And Ohio, which Kerry really needs.) Both of which are scarier to me, actually. Would be really weird to see WI go red and OH go blue. Has that combo ever happened before?

I will lay heavy odds that WI stays blue, though. For several reasons, including The Incumbent Rule, the heavy Dem machinary to get out the vote there, and especially in Wisconsin, Ralph Nader.

Nader is a key factor there, with Kerry being too conservative for many of those folks. Slate shows 13 polls for the state, and there's a pretty strong consensus of 4% for Nader, which is the deciding factor, by far. Not going to happen. Someone (Michael Duffy, from Time, I think), pointed out on This Week yesterday, that popular indie candidates who run a second time are lucky to get half the support the second time around.

This election that effect will be much bigger. The fact that Nader clearly cost Gore Florida and therefore the election soured most of the Naderites who thought they could cast a protest vote and not feel the consequences. (Including me! I must confess, though I also did it because I was voting in the safe red state of CO--very safely red that year.)

That souring was multiplied when the "compassionate conservative / uniter-not-divider" turned out to be a huge liar who turned hard right and bitterly split the country even after 9/11 pulled us all together.

Mark my words: Nader will get a lot less than 4% in WI on election day. I know the mindset, I've been there. You don't like Kerry that much, you're sick of both sides, and you want to register your outrage. So you tell the pollster you're a refusnik, and you're voting for Nader. But when election day rolls around, and you know you're in a pivotal state, and you have the power to put Bush or Kerry in the white house, you know exactly how this played out the last time, you swallow your indignity and you punch the button for Kerry.

You just watch. WI will be blue next Tuesday night.

Also thanks to electoral-vote for the link to the unbelievable U of MD study that the Wash Post picked up yesterday. (But relegated to page 4.)

Finally, I understand how Bush is still capturing the hearts of half the country, despite such a dismal failure on both the economy and Iraq.

Yes, our worst fears our true: Most of the Bush supporters are in deep denial. Not about the conclusions--we are all entitled to our own conclusions--but the facts.

Huge majorities of Bush supporters still believe Iraq had WMD, that Iraq played a big roll in 9/11, and here's the real zinger, that most of the world was behind us in the invasion. Good God.

From the story, by Dana Milbank:

A majority of Bush supporters, 72 percent, believed that Iraq possessed prohibited weapons or had a major weapons of mass destruction program, compared with 26 percent of Kerry supporters who held such beliefs. A majority of Bush supporters also believed experts agree that Iraq possessed banned weapons just before the war, and that U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer concluded that Iraq held prohibited arms or ran major programs. In fact, Duelfer and the others who have probed the matter found neither weapons of mass destruction nor major programs for producing them.

On al Qaeda's ties to Iraq, similarly, 75 percent of Bush supporters believed that Iraq either gave al Qaeda "substantial support" or direct involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; 30 percent of Kerry supporters held these views. A majority of Bush supporters believed the 9/11 commission backed them up on these beliefs, although the panel found no cooperation between the two, only some contacts.

I was also stunned to discover how many Kerry supporters were still buying into this nonsense--yet still rejecting the pres.

But the most outlandish result had to be that majorities of Bush supporters also believe that our bipartisan 9/11 commission and the UN weapons inspectors back them up on these beliefs, when in fact, these sources said the opposite.

Doesn't matter what you say, some people will hear only what they want to hear.

Amazing. Depressing.

Oh, and whose job is it to communicate this information to them?

Oh, if it isn't our old friend the media. Sure, the Bush administration bears a lot of blame, because it was their relentless disinformation campagin--particularly Dick Cheney--that duped so much of the public into believing it, but isn't it the media's job to get the truth to us? To refrain from just broadcasting/printing lies and instead call the liars on it?

Nope, apparently not.

Update:

The more I reflect on this this morning, the more I come back to this passage, which I alluded, but did not quote:

The PIPA poll also found that 31 percent of Bush supporters believed the majority of people in the world opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, compared with 74 percent of Kerry supporters. Bush supporters also believed most of the world favors Bush's reelection. PIPA, analyzing these results, found a "tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information."

Hard not to chuckle about the understatement of that last line, but here's the part that gets me. The question is worded oddly backwards, but it looks like about 70% of the Rs think the world is right behind us on the invasion, and that most actually want Bush re-elected.

The bubble we live in here is just too amazing for words. It's not much of an understatement to say that we went from the whole world embracing us after 9/11, to turning the bulk of the world against us. We are quickly becoming the enemy that the world is likely to unite against if we keep this shit up. And yet the Rs continue deluding themselves that the world is lining up right behind us.

Because they want to. And because of the supreme American arrogance that we can do know wrong, and that because we know we're right, they must think so too. It's that most revolting of human qualities that assumes everyone else must think exactly like I do. That's disgusting. No one can stand an individual who acts that way. How do they think that sort of country is going to be viewed?

America is a great country, but we're not the only people in the world with opinions. When we convince ourselves that everyone must think like we do, we really begin to tarnish that greatness.

Great blog called Republican Switchers tracking all the conservatives endorsing Kerry, including American Conservative magazine, to Lee Iacocca.

(Thanks to electoral-vote for the link.)

Here's a great summary of the various sources on The Incumbent Rule--which even the Bush people were accepting in the spring, when they thought he would be safely ahead. (Scrowl down about one screen-length.)

 This blogger, Chris Bowers, quotes Nick Panakagis, the head of the National Council on Public Polls for the basic idea:

How will undecideds vote on election day? Over 80% of the time, most or all of the undecideds voted for the challenger.

When you look at, say, the latest ABC poll showing Bush leading 49% to 48%, that is not predicting Bush will win by one. History of races with incumbents overwhelmingly suggests that it means Kerry will win by two, 51% to 49%.

Yes, the incumbent nearly always ends up with his final polling number, and the challenger grabs all the undecideds. (More likely, that's the net effect, with some of the incumbent's supporters peeling off--enough more defections than the challengers' to make up for the few undecideds who move to the incumbent.)

This may sound incredible if you're new to watching polls closely, but it's widely accepted in the polling field--only journalists seem oblivious to it, presumably because it's much harder to explain than just posting the numbers and offering the simpleton/moron interpretation offered by simple subtraction.

Follow the link to be overwhelmed by the evidence Bowers sites from a wide variety of sources.

But he also offers passages, to help explain it. It's actually very common sensical once you think about it. Here's an intro, again quoted from Panagakis:

It seems that undecided voters are not literally undecided, not straddling the fence unable to make a choice - the traditional interpretation. An early decision to vote for the incumbent is easier because voters know incumbents best. It helps to think of undecided voters as undecided about the incumbent, as voters who question the incumbent's performance in office. Most or all voters having trouble with this decision appear to end up deciding against the incumbent.