Over the next several days, Best of the Blogs contributors will be peering into crystal balls, or magic mirrors, or shot glasses, or whatever they’ve got, attempting to predict the outcome of the election on Tuesday in some or all of following categories:

Final electoral vote count
Popular vote differential
Senate seat change
Biggest upset or surprise

My predictions are […]

My dad, who died in 1967, was a member of the CIO, the United Steelworkers of America, then when the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged with the American Federation of Labor, the Plumbers Local #55 in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was an elected official of that union. The final year of his life, his influence […]

Going all in on the Maverick taking the moral high ground by not attacking Barack Hussein Obama’s non-friend friend the Reverend Wright, the Washington Post does the attacking for him in the form of a newspaper article. Maybe WaPO will win a Nobel Prize for opinion polling when their geeks figure out the algorithm for […]

The senator refers to the American people as “my fellow prisoners” instead of “my friends” or “my fellow Americans.” He doesn’t even realize he said it. This is the short version. When you watch it the second time, take a gander at Governor Palin’s face as it is happening.

There is an extended […]

In case you somehow missed this.

Marc Ambinder, the Atlantic Monthly author who was among the first to calculate that Obama would win the Democratic primary, has posted some interesting data on how people of different religious preferences split between McCain and Obama. I note that the survey cited was conducted in June-August. I wonder what the numbers would look like now.

My two favorite pieces of commentary on the debate are the video of Frank Luntz working with his Las Vegas focus group  and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com analysis of the internals of the CNN uncommitted voter poll conducted just after the debate concluded. Both confirmed for me something I’ve been thinking about for several weeks now, the […]

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.
In this scenario, the vice […]

George Will, of all people, takes John McCain to the woodshed and concludes by saying,
 
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although […]

Not a bad place to start. Where does viral nativism stop and viral terrorism start? The best dim bulb dems can hope for is the Agnewization of the Palins. Maybe the other shoe will drop after the “first 90 days” and the Maverick will acquiesce to having the P’s exit stage right from the […]