This is no more than a gut sense and a reaction to the reverberations I can feel in the ground. But my gut sense is that this week the conventional wisdom or perhaps Democratic optimism reached into the realm of irrational exuberance. And my own not particularly scientific perusal of the polls suggests some slackening of the strong trend toward the Democrats we’ve seen over the last three weeks.
Don’t get me wrong. The polls still paint an extremely bleak picture for the Republicans. Race after race that should have been safe for the GOP has crept within the margin of error.
Over the last couple months we’ve seen the campaign knocked this way and that by a series of strong pivots, pendulum swings that have driven the news for two or more weeks. Unfortunately for the GOP, most have swung against them. There was the pre-9/11 uptick in GOP fortunes, minute but real and detectable in the polls. Then the collapse of support with the NIE revelation, the Woodward book and mounting chaos in Iraq. And finally Foley.
We’ve got little more than two weeks left before the big day. But the news cycle the campaign feeds on has seemed a bit aimless over the last week. In fact it’s started to feed on itself. And by that I mean that the major campaign issue has been how badly the campaign is going for the Republicans. But that type of inverted news cycle tends to feed on itself and like a bubble, burst.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so much intensity and no news to chew on is exactly that.
I get the sense that this campaign, even with so little time left, has one more big jolt left in it.
What do you think? And what might it be?
