Agreed. Always look to see what percentages the incumbent is getting. If an incumbent at this stage is below 48 percent, he or she is in serious trouble. That means that Reid is almost certainly toast, and there's a better-than-even chance that Boxer will be joining him in retirement.

It can't come soon enough. Oh happy day.

The more I think about it, the more reason for delight I see in the current election season.

There is a previous post about the failure to communicate and persuade and the idea that Obama & co. are too arrogant to do that. I want to think that is true. I do think that those guys are just deaf to to the ordinary concerns of a whole lots of ordinary Americans. But I can't help but remember how many messages we had from the president proclaiming and explaining the goodness of the health care proposals before Congress. There has been a flood of information and outright propaganda from the federal government (your tax dollars at work) which has not sold the deal. For every Pete Stark type of public comment to the effect that the federal government can do to us whatever it likes, there are a hundred voices, both in government and in media outlets of all sorts, telling us that they are merely doing for us what we need to have done for us.

There is this solid body of Americans who do not believe it. They are actually having political effect.

I love this fact.

Then there is this -- where were they two years ago? Asleep? Drugged by hope and change? Just busy trying to cope with an economic pummeling?

Panic? I hope we do not again become complacent. A little panic may be salutary.

Kate, I don't think that the American public has woken up so much as there is no longer an incredibly unpopular Republican President in office, and the Democrats are holding undivided power while the unemployment rate is persistently near ten percent.

Though Obama really did lose the public argument over the health care bill (though not by as much as I would like and not by enough to persuade enough wavering Democrats to vote against it) and I think he would have lost that argument even if the unemployment rate was four percent lower. Though I think the way the law structures political incentives going forward will make things tough for conservatives as time goes on.

And you are of course right about complacence.

My questions were rhetorical. They're the ones I bite my tongue on and do not ask when talking to folks who either did not vote in the last election or voted for a third-party candidate. Mind, I am glad those folks are in the game now.

About a third party: it seems evident at this point that if Republicans waver after this election, they'll be as dead the Whigs in the coming ones.

I like most of you am concerned about the Senatorial polls. But the polls for the house are so overwhlemingly Republican, I don't think people will go out and vote for Repubicans in all the other races and then change their mind for their Senator.

I'm in Colorado.Buck's ahead by 3-4 percent but I think he will win by 5 to 7. Republicans in early voting have cast 53,000 more votes than the Democrats and the unaffiliated voters are breaking heavily for the Republicans. I think we will get 70 plus seats in the House and 9 or 10 in the Senate. If we get 9 look for Ben Nelson to switch parties (he's up for reelection in 2012 and is out of favor with his constituents).