Our own internal polling here in the Progressive Strategy Center gives Kerry a 5 point margin in Florida (50% to 45%), with a margin of error of 3.5%. West Virginia, the race is a dead heat (47% to 47%).

These are major shifts in our polling before the debates, which showed Kerry down two in Florida and down six in West Virginia.

How about we pound this into the email boxes of Chris Matthews, CNN cranks, and whoever else keeps saying Bush is in the lead. I would say we do the same to Ron Fournier, who writes (inaccurate) AP articles on the horse race but I'm not sure he can read.

two things:

1.)  it will fun to watch the media focus on Gallup tonight (yeah, you, Chris "Hardhead" Mathews...you moron).

2.)  Maybe we should try to keep this quiet for as long as possible.  We don't want the GOP to use this to rally their base.  We can call this Operation Trojan Horse.

On their front page, RCP lists the EC as 227-200 Bush leading.  But their battleground toss-up states list consists of NM, OH, PA, WI, IA, and FL.  Of those, NM is tied and they have Kerry leading in all except FL.

That'd make it 279-254 for Kerry, with NM's 5 a toss-up.

Bonus: in their zeal to claim battleground status for PA, note that they list PA's margin as 2.8 - a toss-up - but solidly Blue Minnesota's margin is only 2.4!  Inconsistency?  Cocooning?  you decide...

It will never be too late while it's still October.  But it may take one King Kong of a surprise to do much to the current movement toward Kerry.

For an October surprise:

How about a large military assault?   I read a report this morning about a tightening ring around Fallujah (sp).  If they're desperate, and I'm sure they are, mightn't they risk a wag-the-dog ploy with the intention of reinforcing the impression that Bush is a 'war president?'

Today, Dick Cheney gave a speech in Ohio in which he clearly was trying to scare the hell out of people.    In essence, he warned that terrorists may try to use nuclear bombs on American cities and that Kerry isn't up to handling it.  It was a shameful, fear-mongering speech, and I suspect it was but the first of several designed to scare wavering (swing) voters into voting Republican.  Here's a  link to the Washington Post story.

I can think of only two possibilities that would be anywhere near certain to save Bush: capturing Osama bin Laden, or another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  Now, if I were an Al-Qaeda planner, I would certainly contemplate the latter, since Bush is such an asset to the international radical Islamist movement.  It could backfire, though, because it would represent a failure of Bush's homeland security policy, and refute the "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" B.S. rationale for the Iraq war.   On the other hand, if I were an Iraqi guerrilla leader who didn't give a damn about bin Laden's international movement and just wanted the U.S. military out of my country, I might hit the Green Zone with something like the truck bomb that demolished the Marine barracks in Beirut; a big attack there would probably hurt Bush.  I just hope the Kerry camp has good responses in reserve for all of these eventualities.

The most useful aspect of polls that look good for Kerry is that they make it harder for the Repugs to steal the election.  I am sticking with my Chaos Theory; Rove and his brownshirts will create such confusion, controversey, and chaos that the legitmacy of the election will be in doubt. He will then try to win the subsequent slugfest in the courts. It could be a very long while before a winner is declared, and I anticipate all sorts of ugliness, particularly in Florida. The Democrats need to be out there at every polling place with video gear to document the shitstorm. Those videos could prove invaluable in court proceedings.

At this point I think the DNC ought to commit a major portion of their resources to insuring that we get something that resembles an honest election. Putting a lot more effort and money into trying to convince a few security moms and soccer dads to vote for Kerry/Edwards is not going to pay off if the votes are not counted properly. The Democrats won all four debates, they are leading in the endorsements category, and they are doing much better in the GOTV department. To a large extent the battle has been won, but we are going to lose the war if all the ballots are not counted.

Yes, the trend is that the Democratic sites post pro-Kerry breakdowns, and the pro-Bush sites post pro-Bush breakdowns.

See, e.g.,

Gerry Daly (http://www.dalythoughts.com/ecb.htm): B-222, K-207
Election Projection (http://www.electionprojection.com/elections2004.html): B-274, K-264
RealClearPolitics (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/): B-227, K-220

The polls are what they are.  At least half a dozen states are within the margin of error.  So we can consider the election tied, and it probably will be until election day.

This is what I found on the bushie website. So Kerry has given the election to bush?????? In yet another sign of the President's momentum, the Kerry campaign pulled its advertising out of West Virginia on Friday, making it the latest in a string of their retreats from former "battleground" states. In fact, the Kerry campaign and its allies have now conceded victory to the President by pulling out of Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, after they combined to spend $36 million on ads in those states.

I get Kerry 282, Bush 256

(using electoral-college.com's data as of Tuesday morning)

http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/electoral-landscape.GIF

DON'T EVEN JOKE ABOUT THAT!!!!