Well I'm in a good mood, having just downed a nice big cup of coffee and eaten a barbecue chicken dinner with mac and cheese and green beans.  And then Atrios gave me a robot pony, and Fox News ratings are still crashing.  At this point there's so much sleaze and spin coming from the right-wing and pushed through he press that it's impossible to track a tenth of it, let alone blog about it.  What's relevant now is turnout.  Who's going to vote?  And who has decided that it's just not worth it?

According to our October 29 to 31 survey of 745 likely Arizona voters, fully 30% of the Arizona electorate has already voted.  We expect that perhaps up to two-fifths of the voters in this election will vote early or by absentee ballot.

In our October 8 to 31 tracking polls (since early voting started) we have interviewed a total of 594 early voters.  Among these early voters, Jim Pederson is leading Jon Kyl by 4 points:  44% for Pederson compared to 40% for Kyl, with 4% for other candidates and 12% refused.

This 4% Pederson lead is all the more remarkable since registered Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to have voted early, and in fact there are more Republicans than Democrats in this early-voting sample of 594 respondents.

Furthermore, our latest tracking poll shows that Jim Pederson's margin among early voters is growing as we get closer to the election and as this bloc of early voters expands to virtually one-third of the electorate.  

This early Pederson lead is possibly a harbinger not only of Democratic enthusiasm and enhanced organization in Arizona, but also of the Democratic wave that seems to be sweeping across the nation.  

It also suggests that the Arizona Senate race is closer than it seems to be and could go right down to the wire if undecideds traditionally break heavily for the lesser-known challenger against the incumbent - especially in an election that is trending strongly against the party in power.

This is data I want to believe.  Joel wants to believe it too, but like all partisan polls released this way, it doesn't have as much credibility and it's only one data point (the NRSC released their own memo, which shows the opposite trend).  Traditionally Republicans are the early voters in Arizona, and Democrats show up to the polls.  If the results from this memo are correct, then that's a very big deal.  There is of course no way to know whether the are until November 7th.

In Montana there's a similar trend under way. Early voters are Democrats.  In Tennessee, there's record early voting as well, though it's not clear if those are Corker or Ford voters.  Florida, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, and New Mexico are also seeing very high turnout.

I believe that this election is going to be a total wipeout for the Republicans, and it should shatter Karl Rove's reputation.  Just as the 2000, 2002, and 2004 election campaigns saw him vindicated, if 2006 turns out the way it's looking, his realignment thesis is dead in the water.  Why am I optimistic?  Well historically, midterms are just not good for the party in the White House.  Democratic intensity is very high, and Republican voters are at a normal level of intensity.  Listening to Rush Limbaugh today, I was struck by his constant pleading for conservatives to vote, but even the GOP hate machine is in a lull.  

The dynamics here seem eerily similar to 1994.  

Intellectual Trends

In 1994, the movement conservatives came into partial control of Congress for the first time, sweeping a Southern reactionary majority into power that pushed the full suite of Barry Goldwaterish policies.  This movement was taking over from the dying embers of a New Deal big government coalition built on corrupt urban machines, and had fresh ideas and energy.

In 2006, progressives are coming into partial control of Congress for the first time, sweeping a coastal and western majority into power that will push new environmental and economic policies.  This movement is taking over from the dying embers of Clintonian-Reaganite policies built on a corrupt media machine.  This movement has fresh ideas and energy.

Foreign Policy/Economy

Clinton's failure in Somalia was a symbol of an uncertain American place in the world.  The deficit and the economy were hugely important, but the USSR's fall had left an intellectual hole that the country hadn't filled.  The right-wing was able to argue that America's bipartisan Cold War consensus of engagement with the rest of the world was wrong-headed.

Today, Iraq is a much larger symbol, and the fiscal and economic crises are obviously here as well.  The left-wing has successfully argued that America's bipartisan post-Cold War consensus of random hawkishness and corporate trade is really stupid and immoral.

Conventional Wisdom

At the beginning of the year, the Republicans were confident they would retain their power, and gradually the CW has shifted away from that.  

I don't have Lexis Nexis, but I remember at one point going back to the pre-1994 predictions and reading through a year of Charlie Cook's quotes.  He basically kept increasing his margin of Republican pickups until he predicted a loss of 30 something seats for the Democrats, about where he's at right now.  The eventual loss for the Democrats was 54 seats.  

Scandal as Symbol

A House banking style scandal which is seemingly unrelated to governance but in fact epitomizes the Republican moral perversion broke in the form of Mark Foley.  The leader of the Democratic party was widely perceived as corrupt, with Tom Foley falling out of power.

Death of a National Party

The Senate is in play, with Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Montana looking like they'll flip to the Democrats, a collection of non-Southern states with progressive economic traditions.  In 1994, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Maine went to the Republicans, a collection of non-Southern states with conservative social traditions.  

In 1994, the Democrats became a coastal urban party, with the Republicans winning the Midwest, South, and holding on to moderate Republican seats in the Northeast.  In 2006, the Democrats will make a few forays in the South, but will mostly consolidate the rest of the country and push the fully Southern Republican Party out of the governing coalition.

Cultural Trends

Culturally, 'Falling Down', a movie with Michael Douglas as an angry white male laid-off defense contractor set the zeitgeist, and smashed Toyotas presaged the xenophobia that led to the Perotistas coming into the Republican camp.  Today, movies like 'V for Vendetta' and 'Borat' are cruelly mocking the reactionary turn of American politics, and youth culture has turned from apolitical ('Reality Bites') to decidedly progressive.

Communications Environment

In 1994, the press had begun to change into its modern cable TV pundit driven form, with Maureen Dowd as the new symbol of meaningless snark as analysis.  C-Span was the new communications platform that Newt Gingrich used to pressure this media, along with an increasingly powerful talk radio circuit that had just turned into a real force just two years earlier in 1992.

In 2006, the punditocracy has begun to break down and something else, though it's not clear what, is taking its place.  Youtube has become incredibly political and a mechanism for Democrats to communicate with the public at large.  Talk radio turned into a real force in 1994 after making its debut in 1992, much like the blogs in 2006 are building on 2004.

Conclusion

Ok, so anyway, yeah, this election is a big deal.  But is it a big deal because Democrats are winning?  No, I don't think so.  It's a big deal because the country is changing as Americans think about what has gone over the past six years and reject that course.  Glenn Greenwald nailed it in this post.

More important still, Americans didn't change their views because the media suddenly became adversarial or effective in its watchdog function (it didn't), nor because Democrats found a will or a way to provide meaningful opposition (they haven't), nor because the Bush administration's propaganda is now less ruthless or deceitful (it isn't). They changed their minds largely on their own, by simply looking at what is going on around them and using their critical faculties to compare what they see to the claims made by the Bush movement, and they have noticed the gaping disparities. And they are angry about it. Very angry.

For those who long ago and with complete certainty recognized the corruption and dangers of the Bush movement, frustration can easily set in because this change has been slow and incremental. For those who believe that this President and his administration are so plainly corrupt and evil to the core, the fact that this has been such a long, hard slog can lead to despair and has the tendency to affirm the view that the system is hopelessly stacked against real change. But this progress is real and substantial and meaningful.

Our system of government was designed based on the expectation -- really, the inevitability -- that there would be excesses and abuses of power in the future. For that reason, the founders sought, first and foremost, to provide as many safeguards as possible in the form of self-corrective mechanisms which are intrinsic to the system (and they maximized the likelihood that such mechanisms will prevent abuse by ensuring that radical changes will be very slow and difficult to achieve). And the (imperfect though still consistent) history of American public opinion is that it backlashes against extremism and abuses of power. That is clearly what is occurring now.

1994 was a cultural shift and a political shift all at once.  The Democratic Party was decimated that election in a way that changed our ability to govern and react, but this was undergirded by a public revulsion at the liberal governing model.  Now the public shift in the opposite direction has happened.  The reactionaries, not to mention huge swaths of the press, have forfeited their credibility, and that's not going to come back for some time, if ever.

America is a big place, and while we're political junkies, we're in many ways just instruments for the conversations that take place over kitchen counters all over the country.  Those conversations are different these days.  It's hard to know exactly how, but you can look at the internet where similar conversations are happening and get a sense that the world is in a very different place than it is shown to be in the PR-ified world of ABC News.  Those kitchen table conversations rule the country.  

So who's going to vote?  I don't know.  No one does.  But I'm very optimistic.