It's striking: The Franken campaign really is now convinced that they're going to win this thing.

You could sense their optimism during a briefing they just had with reporters, which was convened to discuss a striking new AP analysis that vindicates the Franken camp's claims that a resolution of the challenged ballots could put them ahead, and also to ridicule the Coleman camp's efforts to stop the count of wrongly-rejected absentee ballots in the wake of Friday's state canvassing board meeting.

Franken's lead recount attorney Marc Elias hammered the Coleman camp for suing at the state Supreme Court, and telling the public they were simply looking for guidance on how to count the ballots. But it turns out the Coleman camp's actual court filing on Saturday showed that they were trying to shut down the counting of those ballots completely. At one point an amused Elias told a reporter: "People usually don't tell the truth for a reason."

The Franken campaign's previous briefings had a very defensive tone to them, as Elias struggled to convince reporters of the validity of both their vote-count methodology and their legal arguments. But now that both arguents have been vindicated, the tone has changed dramatically -- it no longer sounds at all like spin, now that they're in the dominant position.