MyDD summarizes PPP on the early-vote advantage Obama has built, suggesting McCain may have already lost the election in key states. Consider Nevada:

71% of the state's likely voters say they have already cast their ballots and with those folks Obama has a much broader 57-43 lead. McCain's bringing the race to within four points is predicated on winning election day voters by a margin of 57-38.

Or Ohio:

[Obama's] banked a huge lead with early voters, who made up about 30% of the sample. He's up 65-34 with those folks. McCain's tightening the race to two points is predicated on his winning election day voters 54-44.

In other news, my prediction for tomorrow is more optimistic and unrealistic than even Kos's. I can live with that. Get your guess in before the polls close in Virginia and win an Apple MacBook Awesome No-Prize.

Voting Rights Watch: The Department of Justice decides not to honor Bush's request that it interfere in Ohio's election, while North Carolina extends early-voting hours statewide in light of historically unprecedented demand.

Breaking news! Scientists have discovered it is possible for a Republican governor of Florida to be something other than a complete douchebag.

Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday extended early voting hours across Florida to 12 hours a day.

The executive order comes after record early voting turnout has contributed to long lines at polling sites.

As warned, it's a busy kind of week. Here's what I'm reading about:

* Obama returns again to North Carolina tomorrow morning in Raleigh.

* The N&O looks at North Carolina's answer to the butterfly ballot, the straight ticket vote that doesn't vote straight ticket. This is a very foolish way to design a ballot, but it has a long history in North Carolina, and it's fairly well-marked both on the ballot and in the polling place. I'm hopeful this won't be determinative of the outcome here.

* Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

* A PEW Research poll puts Obama up an improbable sixteen points nationally, up 19 among those who have already voted. The RNC has taken to the airwaves in a bid to retain Montana. In Ohio, 22% of the population has already voted, favoring Obama 56%-39%. McCain is only up three points in Arizona. In short, things are looking good.

* Another article looks back to Howard Dean as one of the forces (both before and after "The Scream") who made Barack Obama's candidacy (and, one hopes, landslide victory) possible.

* And another classic for the Palin files: forget "diva," a top McCain adviser says Palin is a "whack job." More at Washington Monthly, which makes the key point: "To blame Palin is to blame McCain. If the campaign is her fault, then the campaign is his fault."

Despite my busy schedule, it's been a bit of a slow news day anyway.

* The ATF busted up a mostly aspirational skinhead plot to kill Barack Obama, which included a much more logistically likely subplot to attack a predominantly African-American high school in Tennessee.

* Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has been found guilty on all counts.

* Another day, another bogus Republican vote suppression list thrown out. Today it's Georgia.

* Chuck Todd just told me on the TV that 1/2 the total 2004 turnout in North Carolina has already voted this year.

* The Field notes that Obama has cleared the 50% threshold in states totaling 286 electoral votes.

* And today's moronic right-wing lie: deliberately misquoting an eight-year-old radio interview to give the impression that Comrade Obama supports court-ordered wealth redistribution. (He doesn't. In fact, echoing the right's own talking points, what he actually says in the interview is that sort of social change should not be pursued in the courts.) On this Ambinder makes an interesting point: Republicans have managed to take an election that was clearly a referendum on Bush and turned it into a referendum on the last thirty years of their failed politics. Quite an accomplishment.

Busy week ahead, so posting will be comparatively light except insofar as I allow the Internets to distract me from my work. We'll see how I do.

A few links:

* The U.S. has apparently launched not-at-all-October-Surprise forays into Syria and Pakistan.

* Barack draws a record 100,000+ crowd in Denver. (See photo.)

* NBC numbers man Chuck Todd is having an increasingly difficult time keeping "objectivity" in the face of Obama's overwhelming advantages; here he is on Meet the Press talking about the early voting explosion and the possibility of African-American voter participation in the neighborhood of 95-100%.

* More early voting buzz: the latest official numbers show Democrats taking a lead over Republicans in the votes already cast, 871,251 to 818,799. As early voting tends to favor Republicans due to the disproportionate absentee balloting of military voters and the elderly, this is good news.

* Jewish voters in Pennsylvania have been warned by the state GOP not to make the same mistake their German ancestors did in the 1930s and '40s. There is so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin.

* Who will replace Obama as the senator from Illinois? Jesse Jackson, Jr., wants the job, despite fears that he may be unelectable statewide.

* The Ann Arbor News endorses *nobody* for president. Well done, sirs.

* And the Internet has created its most bizarrely Dada meme yet: Robocop on a Unicorn.

"We have a very good chance of beating the 64 percent turnout in the 1960 election," McDonald said. "We really could be looking at a historic election in modern American history."

Gallup is tracking the percentage of registered voters who have voted early, and the results are pretty astounding:



Via TPM, which writes:

As of today, the percentage of registered voters is at 10% who say they've already voted. Bear in mind that not all registered voters vote -- in fact a lot of them don't. So the percentage of the 2008 electorate that has already cast a ballot is certainly higher than 10%.

North Carolina in the news!

* News & Observer reporter assaulted at McCain-Palin rally.

* Obama supporters' tires slashed at Fayetteville rally.

* Mostly African-American early voters heckled and mocked by mostly white crowds.

* And craziest of all: Dead bear found dumped on Western Carolina University's campus, draped by a pair of Obama campaign signs.

North Carolina's id has been unleashed. Stay safe, fellow carpetbaggers!

CNN's John King says the McCain camp has given up on Colorado alongside Iowa and New Mexico.

They are now finishing with a very risky strategy. Win Florida... Win Nevada, that is a state that is now critical to the McCain math even though it is only five electoral votes. And here is the biggest risk of all: they say yes, they have to win North Carolina, yes, they have to win Ohio, yes, they have to win Virginia— trailing or dead even in all those states right now—but they are betting, Wolf, on coming back and taking the state of Pennsylvania. It has become the critical state now in the McCain electoral scenario, and they are down 10, 12, even 14 points in some polls there...

I hate to give free advice to McCain, but this is lunatic. The RCP average for Pennsylvania is +11.7 Obama. Pollster.com has it at 15.2%. Nate Silver puts McCain's numbers in PA at 2%.

How bad are McCain's internals in Colorado, if he thinks he has a better chance in PA? He has no chance in PA.

FYI: if he does win PA, I will personally burn both Neil and Srinivas in effigy. Sujata too.

UPDATE: Nick at Cogitamus points at one thing that distinguishes Pennsylvania from other potential McCain last-chances: no early voting.

Presumably this has something to do with information based on Colorado's early vote totals; the McCain campaign must believe that they can't achieve a large enough Election Day victory to offset Obama's advantage in early voting.

Of course, Pennsylvania—Pittsbugh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle, in Carville's famous phrase—is also more ripe than Colorado for racially coded campaigning, as Shankar points out in the comments.

Are the polls narrowing? It's hard to say: MyDD makes a strong claim that they aren't, despite eager media reports to the contrary and an RCP chart that certainly looks like it might be.

OpenLeft, for its part, looks at the electoral map and concludes that Obama has 264/270 more or less locked up whether the polls narrow or not, meaning that we should focus on CO, FL, MO, NV, NC, OH, and VA, a victory in any one of which will mean President Obama. (He's currently ahead in all seven.)

Nate Silver, whose credibility as a statistician gets another well-deserved boost today after the Tampa Bay Rays make the World Series—he was "one of the only people expecting the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to win 90 games this year"—is still predicting an Obama landslide with high certainty, and notes that Obama seems to be dominating early voting. With early voting started, we're in the home stretch now—every day that goes by with Obama in the lead is another ten thousand votes that get locked in for our side.

Can Obama win North Carolina? Yes, we can.

(photo via The Field)

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

The polls are open on Sundays in North Carolina, so Jaimee and I are going out in a bit to do some canvassing. Here are some links in the meantime:

* Obama raised $150 million in September. Holy crap. That's almost twice (in a single month) what he would have had to spend between the conventions and election day if he'd accepted public financing.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in an e-mail to supporters Sunday morning, said the campaign had added 632,000 new donors in September, for a total of 3.1 million contributors to the campaign. He said the average donation was $86.

* Daily Kos diarist dean4ever is keeping tabs on North Carolina early-voting numbers. Here's the three-day total through yesterday:

Noth Carolina saw 37,229 more early votes cast Saturday at an abbreviated slate of 103 sites in 34 of its 100 counties. A 17-day early voting period opened in North Carolina Thursday, and the three day total through Saturday evening is 251,709. The first Saturday in 2004 7,471 voted, and the 3-day total in '04 was 63,164.

and the comparison to 2004:

2008
Unaffiliated 16.46%
Republican 22.11%
Libertarian 0.04%
Democratic 61.39%

2004
Unaffiliated 12.62%
Republican 38.72%
Libertarian 0.14%
Democratic 48.52%

* Sarah Palin was on SNL last night.

* And since "associations" is the new buzzword in the race, it's important to take a look at Kos's rundown of one of John McCain's good friends, G. Gordon Liddy.

As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in "if necessary"; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Why is John McCain palling around with G. Gordon Liddy?

Landslide watch, North Carolina edition.

Across the state, Democrats showed the most first-day enthusiasm. Of the nearly 114,000 first-day voters, 64 percent were Democrats, 21 percent Republicans and 15 percent unaffiliateds.

African American turnout was up significantly. Black voters, who make up about 22 percent of registered voters, were 36 percent of Thursday's early voters.

In 2004, blacks made up 18.6 percent of voters.

Details on where and how to early vote in Durham here.

UPDATE: More at WRAL.

The number shattered the previous record by about 40 percent, said Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections.

"We were expecting long lines from the beginning," Bartlett said. "I do not think it will thin out. I think it will increase, especially during the last week and a half. I believe that there will be continuous lines."

In Wake County, 7,917 people cast ballots Thursday, including 2,088 at Cary Town Center and 1,975 at Triangle Town Center. Lines snaked around both malls, as people waited for up to 30 minutes to vote, officials said.

Durham County elections officials said 6,264 votes were cast Thursday, up 40 percent from the highest daily total in 2004.

Better still are these numbers from a Daily Kos diary:

2008
Unaffiliated 15.50%
Republican 20.26%
Libertarian 0.05%
Democratic 64.41%

2004
Unaffiliated 12.23%
Republican 38.35%
Libertarian 0.15%
Democratic 49.21%

Early Voting begins today in North Carolina, so beat the rush and get yourself down to a voting place. Things are remarkably busy down at the Durham County Board of Elections—when Jaimee and I voted about half an hour ago we were already voters #485 and #486. I could be wrong, but those seem like pretty big numbers for the first day of early voting in the middle of October.

Here's a list of the early voting locations statewide, and here are directions to the site closest to Duke. New this year, there's also an early voting location on Duke's campus, which should boost student voting considerably—things kick off today with a big get-out-the-early-vote rally at Griffith Theater at 1 PM with Kay Hagan, Jim Hunt, and Bev Purdue.

You do not need to have registered in advance to vote during the early voting periods. Here are some details on the rules and the documents you'll need.

Don't let Barack down, NC!

The debate begins in just a few minutes, but there's time to appreciate some good early voting news: 'Obama Dominating Among Early Voters in Five Swing States.'

There's also time to worry a bit about some bad early voting news: Republicans in Ohio have won a court case requiring Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to create computer programs to cross check all new voter registrations so that county boards of elections can doublecheck new registrants. Voter suppression there just got a whole lot easier.

It may not matter: no matter what McCain says or does, it looks like people are voting for Obama anyway.

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."