Prometheus Unbound

The final scene of Dead Poet’s Society, in which a group of students stand up to the authoritarian power structure at their school, and align themselves with a good teacher who has been unjustly maligned, strikes me as an apt metaphor for this election.

This is what is going to happen, I believe, all over the country today:

Read more about the good news here.

John McCain isn’t investing heavy in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania because he’s polling close in those states—but because they’re his only reasonable route to 270 electoral votes.

Chuck Todd explains:

According to the ABC News-Washington Post survey (just released), the race isn’t even tightening:

Overall, 54 percent of likely voters support Obama, 43 percent McCain in ABC/Post interviews the past four nights, exactly where the race was a week and a half ago.

Support for the candidates has run in a narrow band for weeks. Obama’s received 52 to 54 percent support in every ABC/Post poll since Oct. 11; McCain’s been between 43 and 45 percent in that same period. Obama, moreover, hasn’t gone below 50 percent support, nor McCain above 46 percent, since just after the Republican convention.

Part of Obama’s advantage comes from his campaign’s ability to turn out early voters; 27 percent say they’ve already cast their ballots, a strongly pro-Obama group, 59-40 percent. Among first-time voters, moreover, Obama has a nearly 2-1 advantage; many of them are young, and young voters are his strongest supporters.

Overall, 67 percent of Obama’s supporters are very enthusiastic about his campaign, while just 41 percent of McCain’s supporters share that level of enthusiasm for their choice.

Are we heading for a landslide?

Are you with me?

The Republican party on Tuesday?:

It’s fast approaching 6pm on the East Coast, which means that we only have about 30 HOURS to go before the clock strikes midnight and TUESDAY MORNING is officially here.

Can John McCain make up a 9 point polling deficit (per Gallup) in 30 hours?

Not likely.

Know hope.

Go Obama!

In the waning hours of this election cycle, FiveThirtyEight.com has just put up its take on Pennsylvania:

What McCain Has Going For Him

John McCain decided at the last minute to try and throw resources at the state in hopes they would see their internals move. Nate’s point remains the right one: hope is not a strategy. In fairness to McCain, there really wasn’t any other big state he could reasonably expect to obtain, so returning here was marginally less hopeless. Pennsylvania is not a very young state, and has more elderly voters than anywhere but Florida. McCain and Palin are visiting the state left and right in the closing days, but Obama isn’t; which tells you all you need to know about how worried the Obama camp is. Obama even did a nostalgia trip to Iowa over a closing appearance in Pennsylvania.

What Obama Has Going For Him

Barack Obama enjoys a massive voter registration edge, where 52% of the state is now registered Democratic, more than Republicans and independents combined. Obama enjoys a massive organization edge, with an unprecedented operation up and running the state for months. It’s a high Catholic voting state, and Joe Biden’s selection as vice-president helps in the working-class Catholic demographic. Not many white evangelicals or Mormon voters hold down the Republican advantage. Obama and Biden have spent plenty of time in the state, and it’s a done deal.

Obama supporters should be highly encouraged by this analysis, especially given FiveThirtyEight’s great reputation in the area of poll watching.

Obama will win Pennsylvania by a comfortable margin—despite a tightening in the polls there.

Here’s are the reasons:

• Democrats far outnumber Republicans in the state (in terms of registration)
• Obama has a strong “get out the vote” organization on the ground
• Poll tightening will make Obama’s people all the more focused. There will be no complacency about getting out the vote

So know hope—but also work, and get out and vote.

All three Gallup poll measures show Obama with a 9 point (or greater) lead—and there are barely 30 hours to go before the clock strikes midnight and turns into Tuesday morning on the East Coast.

See the Gallup report figures here.

Read about it at Gallup here.

Hurricane Barack may be reaching maximal strength just as the election arrives.

Can we change the course of this country away from Bushism and anti-intellectual religious authoritarian Palinism?

Yes we can!

We are now in the LAST weekend of the presidential campaign season and something extraordinarily corrosive to our democracy has occurred: Sarah Palin, despite the gravity of the office that she is running for, has managed to avoid giving a press conference or appearing on any of the Sunday morning press shows.

It will be an extraordinary fact that, should McCain-Palin win on Tuesday, it will not be clear that Palin is even capable of competently fielding spontaneous questions from the national press corps—or thinking on her feet (without resort to notes, talking points, scripts, or teleprompters).

We vote on Tuesday, and we don’t know if the person behind her campaign curtain actually has an intelligible grasp of domestic and foreign policy and can offer reasonable responses to questions that skeptics have about her.

The very integrity of the role of a free press in a functioning democracy is at stake here.

It is the role of a free press to, like Toto in the Wizard of Oz, ferret out humbugs—and keep power honest.

But the McCain campaign has subverted that process by dramatically limiting access to its VP candidate.

The contempt for democracy that this represents is truly breathtaking. The McCain campaign is literally attempting to shield an apparent humbug (Sarah Palin) from full evaluative exposure: