In case you missed it, today's edition of The Day in 100 Seconds ...

As you can tell we're spending a lot of time these days churning through all the latest and almost endless number of polls. And the big question I've been trying to get a handle on is just what conclusions we can draw, if any, from the big percentage of Americans who've already voted. CBS adds some interesting new data in a poll out tonight that shows the state of the race among likely voters and among those who've actually voted already.

According to the CBS poll, for all likely voters (that includes those who've already voted plus likelies) it's Obama 54%, McCain 41%.

Among those who've already voted, it's Obama 57%, McCain 38%. And that number is not inconsistent with numbers coming out of a lot of the early voting states.

CBS says that "about one in five voters" have voted early. I'm sure I'm just missing it, but I can't find it in the polling document. Meanwhile, Gallup says the number is now 27%, which I find astonishing.

Now, there are two ways of looking at these numbers. One possibility is that the big advantage Democrats are having among early voters is just a matter of regular Dems being so hyped up to get out to vote for Obama that they're disproportionately going early. That, or some variant of that argument, is the one being advanced by the McCain campaign. On the other hand, perhaps this is the actual 2008 electorate showing up at the polls and showing a big swing toward the Democrats.

If we follow the CBS numbers one thing we can rule out is that the earlies are all the new voters. According to the CBS poll, the percentage of early voters who are first time voters is only slightly higher than that of all likely voters.

The number that jumps out at me though is the spread between the numbers for the early voters in 2008 and who they say they voted for in 2004. For 2008, the earlies report going for Obama 57% to 38%. The same group says they went for Kerry in 2004 by a 45% to 40% margin. (Presumably a substantial number of people declined to answer the question.) So it is probably disproportionately 2004 Kerry voters (figuring in the uncertainty of the non-response rate) who are showing up to vote early. But among the early voting group there's been a significant swing toward the Democratic ticket.

One major caveat. The sample size for the early voters is a relatively small subset of the whole poll. So there's a substantially higher margin of error. But the big tilt toward the Dems is consistent with other recent state polls.

Sounds like that vaunted GOP microtargeting machine might be ready for a bit of a tune-up. From TPM Reader QG ...

Interesting anecdote and probably a testament to ground organization. I have no idea what this means. Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with "but he's a f-----g n---er!". Before I get to my wife's response I'll first have to say that I understand desperation and I also understand that this pitch may actually work for a few people. I also understand that there are people who are whack-jobs phone-banking for both sides. But here are some facts:

My wife and I are Black. Citing the fact that Obama is a f----g n---er as a way to sway our vote may not be a great idea. My wife and I live in Maryland... Baltimore, MD.... One of the most African American areas of Baltimore Maryland. How on earth did our phone numbers get on to a McCain volunteers phone bank list of potential voters to be calling at this stage in the game? We have never received a call from the Obama campaign.

Just weird. Not sure what to make of it... but that's not a good sign of organization. If it did anything it made us want to donate more. BTW, the rest of the call went downhill from there. My wife prayed for forgiveness after the call.

Early voting forced a crabby Fred Barnes to come into contact with "all these poor old people" who were trying to cast their ballots in a crowded building with limited parking in that third world outpost known as Alexandria, Va. How dare they:

We hear a lot about the Obama campaign's ground game. And in addition to the general perception that McCain's campaign is overmatched in this regard, word came out just yesterday that the McCain campaign has defunded much of its ground operation to make possible one last push on TV. But a short while ago Politico's Roger Simon gave his take on the difference between the two campaigns' ground operations. And it was very telling ...

Nutball Congressman Chris Cannon (R-UT) tried to hire an Oxford don to use his special computer program to prove that Obama's memoir was actually written by Bill Ayers. The program "can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." Apparently, he got cold feet after the he learned that the Oxford academic, Dr Peter Millican, would release the results publicly no matter what they showed.

Saturday's TPM Track Composite is just out ...

Obama 51.2%, McCain 44.1 -- a 7.1 point spread. Basically no change from yesterday. To be precise, a move in Obama's direction of .2%.

For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I'm under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don't think that's realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It's part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many of us have for the issues at stake in our elections.

But McCain's campaign has devolved into something altogether different ... what with its increasingly open appeals to racial conflict and aggressive invocations of blood hatred of Arabs and Muslims. As The New Republic phrases it, McCain's "subtle incitements of racial warfare and underhanded implications of foreign nativity." Over the months we've become desensitized to the moral depravity of McCain's campaign.

There is of course what appears to be a more conventional attack on economics and taxes. But 'socialism' refers, if we can speak in shorthand, to state ownership of large portions of the economy. In other words, something like the Bush administration's decision to have the government purchase a large amount of the financial services industry. But as John Judis notes, a closer look at the language and imargery McCain's 'socialism' pitch reveals it's actually "about whites paying their taxes so that lazy, indolent, unemployed blacks can live off them."

McCarthyism has rightly become an American shorthand for smearing liberals and anyone else from the center leftward as political traitors. The McCain campaign's current campaign of villification of Rashid Khalidi is cut from a very similar cloth -- the kind of rancid race-baiting that we sometimes see at the fringes of our politics but seldom quite so directly and formally from a national campaign, even going so far as to have McCain himself compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi. Where McCainism is different is in its particular amalgam of racism and xenophobia specially suited to this historical moment, to this opponent and to Americans' continuing fears of foreign threat from Muslims and Arabs seven years into the War on Terror.

We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.

I mentioned below that the Obama camp is making hay of Dick Cheney's appearance today. Well, now they're really going to town with it, weaving it into Obama's speech to be delivered later today. Greg has the details.

Randy Scheunemann's eight-week crash course in neo-conservatism seems to be working on Sarah Palin. Maybe too well.

Dick Cheney made a rare public appearance on the campaign trail this morning:

The Obama camp was delighted.