Question: how much tightening is a result of McCain's low initial numbers coming up to more realistic numbers, vs. Obama's support dropping?

In other words - McCain was never going to get 40 percent of the vote - but at least 45-47...so inevitably his numbers had to come up as people decided.

SUSA's sample has Obama with only 80% of the A-A vote to McCain's 16%. Draw your own conclusions about how plausible that is.

Sorry to crosspost, but look at the internals of this SUSA poll of PA:

They're giving black support to Obama at 80%, to McCain at 16%.

Isn't that a little preposterous?

An Obama aide emails to say that Joe Biden will make a stop in Pennsylvania tomorrow, a sign that the Obama campaign is taking McCain-Palin's big push in the state somewhat seriously, contrary to some conjecture.

At this rate of tightening, John McCain will only be behind by a couple of points at this time next week.

Five point win in PA is what we call a landslide.

Yes there is tightening but do you people look at internals? That SUSA has McCain getting 16% of the black vote. Huh? Just like Rass yesterday had McCain getting 20% of the black vote.

And now there is 'Biden going to PA because SUSA shows tightening' projecting much?

Biden is making a stop on his way back to DE the state next door.

I love the way the McCain campaign has all the liberal media doing the bidding for them creating a narrative that he will win it out of whole cloth. Anything over 5% is a great win for Obama in PA and much much higher than the one Kerry got. The important thing is that Obama never gets below 51-52%.

Sorry for the rant but when talking about polls it helps to undestand how they may be constructed.

You drive to Wilmington from the airport in Phillie.

Sorry to be off-topic, but I want to thank TPM for updating us over this painfully long weekend stretch. I can't stomach anything on TV right now. It's nice to be able to check in here and find out what's going on and read comments to get a feel for what's happening.

The lines in Florida today are 5 hours long. I can't see undecided or lukewarm voters committing to stand on line for 5 hours to vote. They will just go home when they see the line. Obama voters are fired up. The CW is that McCain voters are not nearly as excited for their candidate. I don't see them standing in the rain or heat for hours to vote.

From The Sunday TimesNovember 2, 2008

Republicans try to use Oxford don to smear Barack Obama
The Republicans accuse Obama of 'palling around' with Ayers

Sarah Baxter in Washington

The Republicans have made a last-minute attempt to prevent Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House by trying to recruit an Oxford academic to “prove” that his autobiography was ghostwritten by a former terrorist.

With two days before the election, Obama is poised to become America’s first black president, according to polls showing he has an average six-point lead over John McCain, his Republican opponent.

Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.

He was contacted last weekend and offered $10,000 (£6,200) to assess alleged similarities between Obama’s bestseller, Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers.

Ayers, now a university professor in Chicago, co-founded the Weathermen, a radical 1960s underground group that bombed government buildings in Washington and New York. The Republicans accuse Obama of “palling around” with him.

The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer.

Fox and Cannon each suggested to The Sunday Times that the other had taken the initiative.

Cannon said that he merely recommended computer testing of the books. He doubted whether Obama wrote his autobiography, adding: “If Ayers was the author, that would be interesting.”

Fox said he had hoped that Cannon would raise the $10,000 to run a computer test. “It was Congressman Cannon who initially pointed me in that direction and, from our conversation, I thought he might be able to find someone [to raise the $10,000].”

He believed that if “proof” of Ayers’s involvement was provided by an Oxford academic it would be political dynamite.

Fox contacted Millican, who said: “He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.”

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

I don't have much faith in the polls but I do think the energy is with the Democrats. I figure the undecideds are the ones who don't want to vote for Obama, but I also figure they aren't going to vote at all.

Separately, Ben Smith and Avi Zenilman have a good piece this morning on the racial aspects of the unions' massive efforts to win over blue-collar whites in the Rust Belt states, something that we've been obsessed with here and in our view has gotten far too little attention.

I am putting Frank Rich here as a reply:

Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/opinion/02rich.html?hp

I'm in Pittsburgh (and yes, in a liberal neighborhood) -- but both yesterday and today whenever I started to get nervous, I just look out the window. Canvassing and calling in our area is being run from three houses on my block. For 8 hours yesterday and it looks like today again, the street is parked full and there are dozens of people coming and going to canvass and porches full of others calling. Tomorrow is hang-tagging the doors day and Tuesday is geared up for driving, calling and getting out every single vote.

Honestly, I've never seen anything like it in 18 years of living here.

Sadly I have to work all day on Tuesday (and then likely stand in line for a while), but my husband will be poll-watching in the university area and they've got enough people that he's sharing with another lawyer (giving them both the time to run back and vote at some point during the day).

All of that is McCain raising his numbers. If you look at the Mu poll Obama's numbers were UNCHANGED. The only thing that happened was Mac got some soft supporters. Holding steady and ready for the smurf takeover.

Aaagh, shouldn't have believed the "try again" screen I got, it looks like. Hope no more show up!

In the end, McCain's only hope is caused by this: 50 to 80% of all persons reached by phone this year have refused to participate in polls at all. The refusers tend to be older, more conservative, and are more likely to be racist according to a study reported a few weeks ago. Obama fans are eager to talk woth pollsters in comparison.

This is the biggest X factor of this election -- moreso than the Bradley/Wilder effect that involves actually lying to pollsters.

Of course, Obama's superior GOTV will offset this X factor to some extent.

BTW, last night's Saturday Night Live was one of the funniest in years with Ben Affleck doing great impersonations of an over-the-top Keith Olbermann and also Alec Baldwin. The McCains and Tina Fey were great on a QVC infomercial skit that opened the show.

fuck john and cindy macain

On the bright side - the weather is supposed to be great in Pennsylvania on Tuesday - which, really, could help with turnout for the Dems - really, there's an academic study that says so!

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=5FB9D8D27D9748C9A37EBB2FA1DF6DE0.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=1965128 ("We find that, when compared to normal conditions, rain significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%. Poor weather is also shown to benefit the Republican party's vote share. Indeed, the weather may have contributed to two Electoral College outcomes, the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections.")

So . . . when I went to weather.com just to check the weather forecast (a sign, I secretly figured, of my own obsession/mental instability/whatever) I discovered they actually have a link for weather forecasts in battleground states . . . . (so at least I know it's not just me).

Anyway, here's to this Election Day forecast for Pennsylvania (is this a sign of a benefit of global warming? - 60's in November?!)

(also looks good in Ohio, Missouri, and most of Florida)
_______________________

Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes)

2004 vote: Kerry-D (50.9 pct) 2,938,095; Bush-R (2,793,847
Recent Polls: Obama 52 pct, McCain 44 pct - Muhlenberg Coll/Morning Call (thru Friday)

Philadelphia
weather.com forecast: Mostly sunny, high of 66 degrees (10 pct chance of precipitation), calm winds (4 mph)

Pittsburgh
weather.com forecast: Sunny, high of 68 degees (10 pct chance of precipitation), calm wind (4 mph)

Allentown
weather.com forecast: Sunny, high of 65 degrees (10 pct chance of precipitation), calm wind (5 mph)