I do not know how they come up with this stuff:

Some Democrats worry that those forecasts, accurate or not, may be setting the stage for a demoralizing election night, and one with lasting ramifications, sapping the party’s spirit and energy heading into the 2008 presidential election cycle.

“Two years ago, winning 14 seats in the House would have been a pipe dream,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization. Now, Mr. Bennett said, failure to win the House, even by one seat, would send Democrats diving under their beds (not to mention what it might do to all the pundits).

“It would be crushing,” he said. “It would be extremely difficult.”

Mr. Cook put it more succinctly. “I think you’d see a Jim Jones situation — it would be a mass suicide,” he said.

Who in the heck told them this? This is nuts. Sure I and most Dems would be disappointed. We expect to take the House and should. But crushing? For crissakes.

The Washington Monthly has an interesting series of articles providing a pre-mortem on the elections. The idea is to take the two outcomes, generally Dems win and/or GOP wins, and give advice. A lot of the articles are good but I really like my friend Ed Kilgore's piece, and am taking it to heart:

First, share the credit and forget about blame. Inevitably, some in the party will interpret the victory as a vindication or repudiation of one theory or another about how to win elections. . . There’s never one path to political success, and there’s no guarantee that the political landscape in two years will look anything like it does today. . . .

Mark Green vacated his congressional seat to run what appears to be a losing campaign to unseat Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. A rabidly conservative state Republican legislator, John Gard, is running for Green's seat against a surprisingly popular Democrat, Steve Kagen. The race is close, so the dirty tricks should come as no surprise.

Repeat calls to the same home with the same message are being made in the 8th Congressional District, where Kagen is locked in a tight race with Republican John Gard, said Kagen spokeswoman Stephanie Lundberg.

"People are getting incessantly called," she said, noting that similar complaints had cropped up in other competitive House races around the country. The calls describe Kagen positions in ways Gard and Republicans have portrayed him, for example, saying he favors raising taxes, Lundberg said. Kagen supports rescinding some of the President Bush tax cuts for "the wealthy."

The president can still find enthusiastic audiences for his "stay the course but adapt to win" and "Democrats want the terrorists to prevail" messages. He found one in Pensacola, where he had kind words to say about Charlie Crist and Katherine Harris. Harris was in the audience (if you were the president, would you want to share a stage with Katherine Harris?), but not Crist.

[Crist] said he considered the Pensacola area so firmly in his camp that it made more sense to campaign elsewhere as the race tightened to replace outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush.

Translation: I think I'm winning this election, and I don't want to blow it by sharing a stage with President Bush or an audience with Katherine Harris.

Update: The FBI is investigating.

original post:

The last-ditch campaign to save the Republican Senate may be underway in Virginia:

The Virginia State Board of Elections has received complaints of several instances of alleged voter intimidation and suppression in multiple localities in the commonwealth.

The Virginia State Board of Elections is investigating complaints that voter suppression tactics have been unleashed in African American and Democratic neighborhoods. They include telephone messages like this one:

“This message is for Timothy Daly. This is the Virginia Elections Commission. We've determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote on Tuesday. If you do show up, you will be charged criminally."

Other voters have been told -- falsely -- that their polling place had changed.

Apparently Republicans believe they constitute all whites:

Congressman John Lewis, Former Mayor and Wal-Mart star Andy Young, and current Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin have up a very vile ad attacking white people, which you can listen to here.

As a listen to the ad demonstrates, it is an ad criticizing Republicans, not white people. What does Michael Steele think of this Red State idea that Republican = white?

BTW, the idea of the author of the vile Georgia Voter ID law lecturing JOHN LEWIS on racism is rather sick.

Gawd help us, let's hope SUSA wins the polling sweepstakes this year. First Webb up 8 and now:

Since Survey USA began polling likely Missouri voters months ago, the cliffhanger race has see-sawed frequently. The day before the election, Survey USA, in a poll exclusively for KSDK in St. Louis, found that McCaskill had opened up a lead, getting support from 51% of likely voters in Missouri, and Talent getting 42%. This is the first time one candidate has been deemed to have a lead significantly outside the margin of error (+/-3.3 in this poll).

The "shrill" Josh Marshall:

Atrios has this right. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are each ignoring the GOP's nationwide campaign of false-flag robocalls meant to harass voters and fool them into thinking the calls come from Democrats. If it were Dem on GOP, if it were on Drudge, the cable nets would be on it wall-to-wall. As it is, they're content to ignore it.

That's because the powers-that-be in the mainstream media are in the tow of the Republican party. The Halperins and Crowleys of the news biz are all part of the same corruption.

Like Halperin says, Drudge rules their world.

You have to understand that and absorb that before you can set about doing what's necessary to change it.

Well, we get to hear a bunch of "pundits" spout nonsense about the "state of the race." So newsworthy.

UPDATE: ABC covered it on its nightly news. I am sincerely shocked. Good for ABC.

David Corn asks whether Bush and Cheney want the Republicans to lose tomorrow, citing Bush's recent endorsement of Rumsfeld, his refusal to acknowledge reality in Iraq, and Cheney's decision to go hunting on Election Day. A more likely explanation for Bush's actions: an arrogant inability to accept the consequences of his inept decision-making. And from Cheney's perspective: hiding from reality in a duck blind is more pleasant than confronting it.

Will 2006 finally be the end of Newt Gingrich's Contract on America?

Among those GOP lawmakers in hard-fought races are several vying for seventh terms, first elected in the Republican revolution of 1994. Back then, the party gained 52 seats to end four decades of Democratic control with promises of balancing the budget and enacting term limits.

Of course, any adherent to the Gingrich contract who is still in office has ignored the contract's "term limits" plank. Republicans who don't keep their promises? What a shock.

The late deciders are going to Webb:

Democrat Jim Webb has surged ahead of Republican George Allen in the last poll of the campaign, conducted for News-7 by SurveyUSA. The survey shows Webb with 52% of the likely voters, with 44% going to Allen.

The Booker decision gave federal judges an opportunity to craft sentences that are appropriate to the offender and offense, guided but not bound by the federal sentencing guidelines. Appellate courts after Booker are to review sentences for reasonableness.

Many federal appellate courts have undermined the Booker decision by reversing sentences that fall below the advisory guideline sentence, and some have gone so far as to deem a guideline sentence presumptively reasonable, while giving less deferential scrutiny to sentences that are more lenient than the guidelines suggest. (Courts seem less troubled by sentences that exceed the advisory guideline.) These decisions have the practical effect of restoring the binding force of the guidelines, recreating the constitutional problem that Booker purported to solve: mandatory punishment for crimes that are never proved to a jury. (TalkLeft background on the Booker decision is collected here.)

The Supreme Court on Friday accepted review of two cases that question whether within-guideline sentences deserve more deferential review than those that fall outside the guidelines.