A SurveyUSA poll supposedly shows the Maryland Senate race in a 47-47 tie. Now, one should take this with a grain of salt as the internals haven’t yet been released, but this result doesn’t seem to surprise me all that much. Steele has run a strong, smart campaign against Cardin. Steele has the backing of several influential African-American leaders. If he can get even a small slice of the black vote, he has a strong chance at winning. While the polls have tended to show Cardin well ahead, I’m not entirely convinced that the polls are right on this one. Steele could very well pull a surprise upset.

The whole electoral landscape keeps shifting. I was sure that Tester had it in Montana, but it looks like voters in that state are having some reservations about having the Senate potential go under Democratic control. Kean isn’t out of the race in New Jersey. Talent is still within the margin of error in Missouri. Corker seems to be pulling ahead of Ford in Tennessee. The numbers would seem to indicate that this race will be down to the wire in several key states.

It’s all going to come down to organization and turnout — fortunately the GOP is excellent at both. The question is will it be enough? That question may have to wait until Election Day or even beyond if the races continue to be as close as they are.

Charlie Cook is predicting that there’s a strong “Democratic wave” brewing. Jay Cost finds his analysis less than convincing. There’s a good chance that the Democrats will retake the House as the Republicans are simply fighting on too many fronts to have a truly strong chance. However, I wouldn’t count on there being a major “Democratic wave” either. As Cost notes, Cook is predicting a realigning election, which just doesn’t seem that likely:

Don’t get me wrong. I see where he is going with his race rankings. His latest generic ballot has the Democrats up a quarter century among the most likely voters. And he thinks that this voter disaffection is just going to overrun the Republican Party. He sees this as 1994 in reverse. But an examination of the races he views as competitive just does not square with 1994. It squares more with something like 1860, 1896 or 1932 – the last three “realignment” years.

What Cost is saying is that Cook is predicting that a very significant number of solidly Republican districts will flip this year — which has never happened except in the context of a realigning election. And there has never been a realigning election which has started in the House. Realigning elections happen in roughly 32-year cycles in American politics, shifting the partisan landscape around in fundamental ways. That just doesn’t seem likely in this case.

Despite all the Democratic triumphalism, the electoral landscape isn’t swinging very strongly. Neither party is particularly popular, and there’s no grand mandate for Democratic policies at play here. The Democrats are having their greatest amount of success in areas where they’re running conservative candidates — which is great if you’re a partisan cheerleader, but it hardly advances the Democrat’s ideological agenda. If the Democrats really smelled a realignment, they’d be far less ideologically constrained than they have been. The numbers don’t seem to show a realignment, and neither does the rhetoric.

Cook could be right in predicting a Democratic wave — but then we should be seeing races diverging, rather than tightening. So far, we’re just not seeing that kind of movement. Many key races are within the margin of error, or we’re seeing slight GOP gains. The Democrats have yet to close the deal, and what the polling doesn’t show is the efficiency and accuracy of the GOP turnout machine, which is already showing dividends in absentee voting. If anything, all this talk about how a Democratic win is practically inevitable may depress Democratic turnout in an electoral season when the Democrats need to get all their partisans to the polls.

Cost seems to have the better analysis here — the Republicans are undoubtedly down, but they’re not out, and talk of some massive Democratic “wave” seems to be all wet.

It looks like John Kerry’s outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease has caused him to get treated like a bad rash by Democratic candidates. Senator Kerry was supposed to appear with 1st District candidate Tim Walz today in Mankato, but now Kerry will not show up. The fact that Walz is running in a conservative district with plenty of American Legion members undoubtedly was a major factor in this decision.

Kerry’s comments were bad enough — but his absolutely brainless response to them was like pouring gasoline on a fire. Rather than merely apologizing for being a bonehead, Kerry decided to launch into an incoherent and spittle-flecked attack on Republicans. Karl Rove didn’t make Kerry an idiot, and even if Kerry was misquoted (which I rather doubt), the comment was still stupid.

Kerry’s mouth is the gift that keeps on giving — the second it opens, something idiotic spews forth. Now the Democrats are on the run from their own previous Presidential nominee, and the voting public can have a clear view of what the Democrats really think.

Thank heaven that yutz isn’t President…

UPDATE: Now Harold Ford, Jr. is calling for Kerry to apologize, as is John Tester. So, are these two part of some vast right-wing conspiracy? Are they being dishonest for not saying that Kerry was misquoted? Or is it that there’s yet another double standard at play here?

What Kerry said was unconscionable, and it’s part of a long pattern of behavior. The more Democrats who rally to his defense, the more it cements the idea that the Democrats have issues with our men and women in uniform. It’s not at all surprising that Democrats who actually want to win are running from Kerry as fast as they can…

UPDATE: Presented without comment:

Michael Barone has an excellent piece on the way that polling works (or doesn’t) in the 21st Century. It’s looking increasingly like the old techniques of political polling aren’t coping well with technological change. Voters are less likely to have landline phones, and less likely to have time to bother with answering a pollster’s questions. Barone casts some doubt on the results of many of the polls that have come out for this election cycle:

If you could go back in history and conduct polls, I don’t think you’d find any, and certainly not many, two-year periods when the balance in party identification shifted from even to having one party 12 percent ahead of the other.

At this stage of the campaign, pollsters try to screen their respondents and report only those who answer a series of questions in ways that suggest they are actually going to vote. Many polls find that a higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans pass the screen. Others find similar proportions do. But pollsters of both parties will admit that polls do a poor job at projecting turnout.

I don’t buy for a second that the Democrats have shifted partisan ID by twelve points in two years. If that were true, the Democrats would be ahead in nearly every race by huge margins. However, the balance of power in Congress remains close — even if the Democrats win, it seems unlikely to be by more than a handful of seats.

It could be that the problems with polling is due to methodologies not keeping up with the times. It could be due to unconscious bias. It could be unconscious bias. Whatever it may be, the polls seem to be diverging more and more from the actual face of the electorate. When we’re talking about a potential 12 point bias towards the Democrats in an election that is already looking to be quite tight, it’s entirely possible that Election Night could be quite surprising…

Cait Murphy argues that a Republican loss in the midterms would be a good thing for the GOP. In a way, she’s right. The GOP has lost its moorings and has become too comfortable in power. Many of the mistakes that have been made have been due to the slow corruption of the Republican Revolution of 1994 to the K Street culture. As Murphy observes:

The Republicans are a tired party right now, in need of a good internal shake-up. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Take Congress – please.

According to a recent poll, only 16 percent of Americans approve of its performance. This, of course, is not entirely the GOP’s fault; after all, there are lots of Democrats filling office space there, too. But fish rot from the head down. Leadership means accepting responsibility, and this is about as incompetent, dysfunctional and trivial a Congress as this proud nation has ever seen.

Then again, does anyone really think that a Democratic congress would be any more competent, and less dysfunctional, or any less trivial? Remember, this is the party that elected Howard Dean as their chairperson.

On the other hand, I do think that the Democrats will take the House, if by a narrow margin. Two years of Speaker Pelosi, the virtually inevitable round of pissant “hearings” pointing fingers at Bush, and the possibility of the Democrats doing what they really want to do and impeaching Bush make one wonder just how low the opinion polls for Congress can go. When Congress has the sort of approval ratings usually reserved for plague rats, one would think that they can get no lower. Well, as a great man once said, “baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

However, there has to be more than political concerns at stake here. The effects of two years of Democratic “leadership” could have disastrous effects at a crucial moment in our national history. We’re at war with an implacable enemy. Our government is taking us all too far down the road to serfdom. World trade is becoming increasingly important to our economy and global stability. The Republicans have done an unspeakably poor job of advancing our interests in these areas. The Democrats stand against them. Yes, a loss would perhaps make the GOP revisit their own core ideas. The question is, will the damage be so great as to erase the gains?

Divided government may help shock the GOP out of complacency without harming the national interest. The Senate can provide a check on the House, and the President will have to use his veto pen less sparingly. However, having the Democrats take over Congress at this point is just too dangerous to the Republic, if not the Republicans.

One of the most endangered Republican Senate incumbents is Conrad Burns, who has been running behind Democratic challenger John Tester for some time. However, a new Mason-Dixon poll has the race within the margin of error, and the movement from the last poll using the same company (and, I assume, the same basic methodology) shows the movement on Burns’ side.

More to the point, Burns’ war chest is 3 times that of Tester, which gives him a big advantage in the waning days of the race.

Burns has been hurt by his association with Jack Abramoff, but it looks like his fortunes are making a late turn for the better. Montana is a very conservative state, and John Tester has the disadvantage of having his name being linked to the left wing of the Democratic Party. An endorsement by the Kossacks doesn’t carry much weight on the Montana prairies. As Montana voters go to the polls, would they risk putting the Senate in the hands of liberal Democrats? I would expect that while much of Burns’ support is indeed soft, he’s not out of this race yet. Tester has run a stronger campaign that I would have predicted, and Burns has made many crucial mistakes. However, Tester has yet to seal the deal, and with time and money running out, this race could go either way.

Barack Obama is weighing a Presidential bid in 2008. Obama is probably one of the nation’s best orators, he’s got a life story that’s nothing less than amazing, and he’s a polished, credible, and strong candidate. However, Obama is also a died-in-the-wood statist liberal. As an orator, he’s by far the best the Democrats have. As a politician, he’ll face a much harder challenge than the token opposition he faced with Alan Keyes’ disastrous run in 2004.

Obama is one of those candidates who is certainly a potential Presidential candidate, but whose policy credentials are iffy at best. In terms of sheer star power, Obama has what it takes. In terms of policy chops, he’s a lightweight. The Democratic far left is hoping for someone, anyone to be the anti-Hillary, and Obama is about their best shot. However, Obama has never had to run in the scorching light of a national campaign, he’s never had to be under the intense pressure that it creates, and he’s never had to articulate a policy position beyond his own admittedly incredible life story. Having a great biography isn’t enough to win the White House, and I’m not sure that Obama has the policy chops to pull it off — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wouldn’t be a formidable candidate for any GOP challenger to beat.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has some interesting thoughts on a potential Obama run.