A new poll by ARG has Brown by a small margin 48%-45%.
With three days of intense campaigning to go and the extreme difficulties of polling a special election like this, it’s really anyone’s game.
I have none of the statistical analysis skills of Nate Silver. But even I can see the pattern that stands out in the eight polls of the MA-Sen race taken in January. The numbers have been all over the place. And there’s been an unmistakable surge in the numbers for Scott Brown, who now appears to be narrowly ahead. But with the exception of the suspect poll from CrossTalk/PajamasMedia, none of them have either candidate higher than 50%, regardless of who’s ahead.
Part of the arcana of the ‘birther’ movement is the claim that Barack Obama’s parents were never actually married, and that Obama was born out of wedlock. In a TV chat show appearance back in 2008, Scott Brown suggested that he also didn’t think Obama’s parents ever got married and that Obama was an out-of-wedlock child.
It turns out not only is the FBI good for counter-terrorism, domestic law enforcement and various other stuff. They’re also good at national comic relief.
Remember a few days ago the State Department released a photograph of what Osama bin Laden might look like today, having aged several years since we saw him last? I kind of figured they’d churned it out of some super-expensive, high-tech photo-age-o-matic device we’ve been spending homeland security dollars on.
Well, ‘fraid not.
It turns out the technician who produced the picture did so by combining bin Laden’s features with a photograph of another 52 year old guy he found using Google image search. Said FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman: “The forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the internet.”
And it gets better.
It wasn’t just any random 52 year old on the web. It was a prominent left-wing Spanish politician named Gaspar Llamazares.
After the FBI’s admission the US Department of State has withdrawn the image.
It’s just hints and shards of information. But it’s looking like Scott Brown’s furious momentum in Massachusetts began to ebb at the end of last week. You can see some of this in Steve Kornacki’s blog. He’s been reporting what he says on the daily internal tracking polls of the Coakley campaign. And hints from polls to be released this evening and tomorrow suggest an electorate trending back slightly more Democratic. Read More
TPM Reader PM reports from Somerville …
What follows is my update from Mass, which is colored by my phonebanking experiences and thus may be anecdotal.
Voters increasingly seem to know how consequential the race is, which is certainly a good thing from Coakley’s perspective. That would have been enough to ensure her victory a week ago holding everything else constant. Unfortunately, though, she’s made some horribly off-message comments—like suggesting that Catholics shouldn’t work in emergency rooms and that Curt Schilling is a Yankee fan. I’m not certain those things matter in and of themselves, but they’re part of a developing narrative that she’s out-of-touch. So, I think the best that can be accurately said is that it’s a dead heat—the DNC did what it needed to do in framing the issues and knocking Brown’s favorables down. There appear to be very few undecideds.
Longtime TPM Reader FC checks in …
An update from someone working the past 2 days in suburbs around Boston and the high-turnout neighborhoods of West Roxbury and Hyde Park.
There were some hints over the weekend that Brown’s momentum might have ebbed. But PPP doesn’t see it.
Joe Biden is making noises about revising the Senate’s cloture rules: “This is the first time every single solitary decision has required 60 senators. No democracy has survived needing a supermajority.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.