Someone else said that the McCain people would stay in Michigan and work for the RNC or the RNCC or something. It made it look like it was a budget-juggling thing for reporting and regulation purposes.

Treat as speculation.

If the Dems thought Michigan was ground they still had to defend,

But if we're going with that, McCain should of stayed in Michigan until the election. They might have pulled out to work on Ohio. When you're losing every decision looks like a bad decision.

max
['See Obama and August.']

I imagine McCain has made the quite rational calculation that he has no hope in Michigan as long as the economy is in the process of tanking. He doesn't need Michigan. He does need Ohio and Florida and Nevada and Virginia and New Hampshire, though. Plus one other state. Maybe Penciltucky.

Pencils come from Pencilsvania
Vests from Vest Virginia
Tents from Tentasee
They know mink where they grow mink in Wyomink
A camp chair in New Hampchair that's for me
And minnows come from Minnowsota
Coats come from Dacoata
But why should you be blue?
For you you come from Rhode Island
And Little Ole Rhode Island Is Famous For You!

He does need Ohio and Florida and Nevada and Virginia and New Hampshire, though.

Which is to say, he's fucked.

Ohio wears Michigan like a big fucking ugly growth or something.

New Hampshire really loves McCain. Further, I hope they do get many people registered in Michigan all the same. I would love to see the popular vote run up nationwide to get a mandate.

Huh. My comment didn't post.

NH really likes McCain.

I would still love the Dems to register as many voters as possible in Michigan. I'd really like to see the popular vote totals run up so that Obama can have some sort of mandate.

Okay, so it did, but there was a looooong delay.

And now the Detroit unions can spend all their time between now and the election focusing on early voting GOTV efforts in Ohio if they so choose.

The UAW long ago negotiated election day as a holiday. The car companies realized too late that they were putting tens of thousands of union members in the streets to do GOTV.

No, it's Wisconsin wears Michigan like a hat.

New Hampshire really loves McCain.

Latest Rasmussen poll of New Hampshire says Obama 53, McCain 43.

I go to New Hampshire every summer. The number of white people up there is astonishing. And they are libertarian white people, not stand-mixer white people. A lot of PUMA types who hate taxes. If this race tightens, I could easily see NH flipping back to McCain.

Which could be interesting. If Obama takes all the Kerry states, plus New Mexico, Colorado, and Iowa, but loses New Hampshire, then it will be a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. I am sure that hijinx would ensue...

If this race tightens, I could easily see NH flipping back to McCain.

I'm not picking on you with this, it's just what made me have the following thought: honey, if my great state of North Carolina is a potential swing state then the race is over. What that means for me, though, is that my money and my election work are all the more important and this is easily the closest my vote has ever come to counting, not that we should all just relax and watch the clock run down.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the MI thing on the radio this morning was, (a) the last time I remember hearing that in the news (undoubtedly not the last time a candidate has done this) was in '88 when Dukakis closed down his Florida operation in, what, August? September? and (b) that if McCain has to pull out of MI to work on Indi-freakin'-ana, a state Bush won by 20 points in 2004, then he knows he's sunk, too.

14: I sure hope you are right. But if Al Queda blows up an embassy next week, its a whole new ball game. It ain't over till its over.

if Al Queda blows up an embassy next week

My guess is that really wouldn't change things much at this point.

Al Queda

Tell me you did that on purpose.

Hey, where I come from, Q's have U's after them.

But if Al Queda blows up an embassy next week, its a whole new ball game. It ain't over till its over.

A terrorist attack might be difficult for the McCain campaign to organize on demand. It would be much simpler to have Palin's son gloriously killed in combat in Iraq. That's probably a tough conversation for McCain to have with his running mate, but ultimately she's going to have to take one for the team.

In a pinch, they could have some other poor sap killed in such a way that the remains are hard to identify; the DNA tests would be conveniently held up until after the election, when young Mr. Palin the MIA would miraculously emerge from captivity.

if Al Queda blows up an embassy next week

Didn't a bunch of terrorists detonate a massive bomb in Pakistan a few weeks ago? Wasn't exactly front page news. It's more likely Osama will try to influence the election by releasing a tape endorsing Obama.

I can't figure out Minnesota. The state polls there seem divided into two categories, a set that have Obama with a solid lead and another set that show them essentially tied with McCain sometimes ahead. And it's been like that ever since Obama got the nomination. It may just be that the state is underpolled, and I'm seeing small-number effects, but the polls seem more consistently inconsistent there than anywhere else.

I also got the impression from watching pools in 2000 and '04 and '08 that Minnesota may be one of the very few formerly blue states now trending purple. But people on the ground there say that's not true. Meanwhile, McCain is shifting resources into there. What's going on? Is it just an unusually stark urban-rural split messing up the sampling?

There have been crazy polling differences in North Carolina, too. My guess is that polling orgs are having trouble figuring out who likely voters are this year and how to weight different subgroups, what with all the new voter registrations.

Or how many times you're planning to vote, Apo.

There's been a tremendous barrage of McCain ads in Minnesota. It's ground zero of whatever offensive effort McCain is going to make.

Minnesota, along with Iowa and Wisconsin, is still far better than the other mostly-white interior state, but its days as a liberal stalwart are probably over for good. Minnesota exurbs are just like everyone else's exurbs, and that's at least two or three districts. The two rural districts are fairly conservative, and there are only three urban districts (counting Duluth).

I checked Minnesota vs. Texas, though, and the most pro-Bush Minnesota district was 56%, whereas something like 2/3 of the Texas districts were more pro-Bush than that. And you don't really have anyone in Minnesota who's never met a liberal in their whole life.

Oddity: the Minnesota Republican Party is more conservative than the average Republican Party, and the Minnesota Democratic Party is more liberal than the average Democratic Party, and they're fairly evenly matched with a Democratic advantage. It makes statewide races gnarly.

In the Senate, Sen. Coleman is running an unremitting negative campaign of personal attacks against Al Franken. Things like distorted photos and allegations of pornography. Despite the fact that Coleman is famously gay with a fake marriage and has a very dubious stoner past. He's somewhat moderate but possibly the creepiest Republican Senator otherwise.

Actually, just going by the electoral-vote.com state charts, North Carolina looks perfectly comprehensible--it's a red state that had a big post-convention bounce for McCain and is now tied up because of the economic crisis. But here's Minnesota. I assume those crazy sawtooth jumps are just the systematic differences between different bunches of polls, but boy are they large.

...Also, Wisconsin is much better behaved.

Minnesota has a homegrown billion dollar fraud case. It may close down Sun Country Airlines, owned by Tom Petters. It seems entirely disconnected from the financial meltdown.

25: It looks like that on the graph, but simultaneous polls gave McCain 20- and 2-point leads, before Obama pulled even (or ahead, depending on the poll).