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Tuesday, November 07, 2006

A Final Word

Electoral-vote.com has some interesting last-minute news. Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb are the consensus picks in the polls today in Missouri and Virginia, although both obviously remain very close, and Montana, Maryland, and New Jersey, which had looked shaky, seem solid for the Democratic candidates. In Arizona the lead of Republican John Kyl is suddenly down to six points, but no one expects him actually to lose, even though the Democrats are poised to pick up a Congressional seat or two there.

Electoral-vote.com may not tell the whole story simply because there are districts where no poll data has been publicly released that may be in play. One such is Kansas' 2nd, held by Republican Jim Ryun. Ryun is about one month older than I am and in the mid-60s, when I was very interested in track and field, it was very exciting to watch his emergence as the world's leading miler, even though, like every American miler, he could never win Olympic gold. Wouldn't you know, he turned out to be a conservative Republican. . .in any case, he won last time by 56%-41%, which is no guarantee (see above) of victory this time. Electoral-vote.com has no polling data on the race, but Karl Rove apparently does. President Bush actually made a campaign stop on Ryun's behalf the other day. I'll be watching that race very closely tonight.

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