The goddamned horse race
The horse race. The horse race. The horse race.
Everyone complains that there’s too much focus on the horse race, and that other more important things and other things that need to be mentioned and covered. What — is a person supposed to stare at poll numbers all the time? What good is prognostication — like going to Vegas and putting money on this Sunday’s football games.
But things come back to the horse race. It’s a Spectator Sport, mildly participatory if you chime in as a volunteer to a campaign. It is election time. Go forth on other things when the election is over, and reform yourself then. When the election is over, I can shift through the pegs and move on — equal parts nihilistic and idealistic. After all, in the most nihilistic impulse — elections mean nothing and the parties are bought and paid for by the same entities, and move forward from there if you want — it is what you are left with: I think the Patriots will beat the Colts. Does it matter? Sure, why not: GO TEAM!
I’ve twice predicted that the Senate will end up 50 to 50, with two different sets of barometers. I’ll go ahead and stick by that. I’ll make a change to my last prediction template, though. The Democratic candidate in New Jersey will defeat the Republican candidate. Bob Menendez, a corrupt party politboro, will defeat the other mediocrity whose hopes lay in the public confusing him with his father. I stand behind every other prediction. But we remain at 50 – 50 because I predict I’m wrong about one of these predictions. Does that last sentence conflict with “I stand behind every other prediction”? You bet! But, as a wise founding father of our country once said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Go through the list of where I am wrong. Maybe Missouri. It’s a precarious spot, that. Polls show a 49 to 49 tie, with 2 percent undecided. Polling forward for the purpose of leaners, the 2 percent undecided are split 49 to 49 between the two candidates. So the race either comes down to the “ground game” of which party can get out the vote of its voters, or it comes down to which candidate has the best ballot stuffing or computer hacking capability.
Montana. At the moment, Conrad Burns has momentum in the polls, and indeed the RNC has pulled resources back into the race after dropping out of sight. Montana apparently is red enough– Bush won by 59 percent – so as to allow Bush to poke his head in. Blurry reports behind the scene suggest that there are some positive early voting returns and buzz for Jon Tester headquarters. Make of that what you will, but I do note that those blurry reports were rampant just before Primary Day when Tester was tied with is primary opponent but defeated him handily.
If polls are to be believed — and they’re good enough to judge the direction of horse races, I was correct in my early assessment regarding Tennessee and Virginia, which was that Jim Webb has a better chance of victory than Harold Ford — this being back right after the primary elections when polls had Webb trailing Allen by 20 points. I may have just been lucky on that one — who could have forseen George Allen running the nation’s worst election campaign? But I suppose I can say my prognostication ability is improving, which is to say I could compare Tennessee’s 2006 election with Oklahoma’s 2004 one and see similarities.
Should Bob Corker defeat Harold Ford, Jr., it will be impossible not to conclude that the subtly racist advertisement and the overtly racist advertisement was the turning point. Honestly, though, the only reason — beyond party control — I would particularly hope for Ford to become Senator is that he would push the number of black Senators in American history past one hand. At any rate, this boosts Bill Frist’s presidential bid, I suppose, or at least ebbs it less than if Corker loses — particularly since Corker’s campaign was sinking until Frist tossed him his campaign staff. (Kerry did that during his 2004 primary campaign — borrowed Edward Kennedy’s.) That’s a bit of a joke, since Frist is never ever going to be elected president, but I’ll just let that muse reverberate there. I suppose their solution to Corker’s struggling campaign came down to exploit Ford’s race. If I wanted to give them more credit, tie Corker to Tennessee and tie Ford to Washington.
It looks as though things are a’happening in Arizona, a race generally ignored but where polls and other signs have popped up such that the Democratic Party is pushing resources Jim Pederson’s ways. I heard somewhere that party of the Democratic Party’s strategy in assessing where to spend their money was to try to consolidate some states to become more fertile ground for 2008 — and Arizona would be example #1 of that strategy. Hence a bunch of Arizona house races are funded to make Arizona more than just the “feign in and pretend like we’re running a campaign here” state it was in 2004. I presume that there is an inverse of the top of the ticket coat-tail effect going on here. We want Jim Pederson to win because that would toss Jon Kyl aside. If by some miracle Ned Lamont defeats Joseph Lieberman, the two chairs of the current iteration of the “Committee on Present Danger” will be shoved out of the Senate. Thus two Senators who would like to bomb every nation on Earth would be gone — at least from the Senate. That would be a good thing. But it’s best not to get one’s hopes up. We can only be so lucky.
That’s where things stand. Make the most of them.