Silver doesn’t mention this explicitly, but what jumps out at me is the sheer irrationality of the primary process – so much depends on the order in which states vote and the nature of the vote (ie closed or open primary, caucus). Then there’s the unrepresentativeness of some of the states which are most important in the primaries by size and demographics, not to mention the fact that primaries tend to privilege an electorate which is closer to the ideological extreme than those voters who will actually decide the general election. All of that applies to the Democrats too, of course, but it’s unlikely they’ll have competitive Presidential primaries in 2012.

I’ll admit it. I just can’t concentrate. How many times can I check 538, pollster, or real clear politics? Hundreds of times a day. I arrived at my office at 8AM with the best of intensions. It’s 10:50. I can’t get anything done. I don’t have any high hopes for tomorrow’s productivity either. Who else is an anxious wreck? Anyone calm?

Martin Kettle looks at why Democrats are stuck in the subjunctive:

What is really happening, I think, is that Obama is going to win, and the Democrats are going to do spectacularly well in the Senate and House races too. But the mood here is like a cup final where your team is ahead with a few minutes to go. Those last few minutes seem to take forever. So near and yet so far. You overreact to every little event on the pitch as the time drags on. You scream manically at the referee to blow the whistle. Right now, Democrats are in that position. They just want it to be over now. But deep down, they don’t really think that they will throw this one away. They just want the whistle to blow so they can cast off the subjunctive and start celebrating.

The last great white hope (sorry!) for McCain may be the Bradley effect, but Thomas Noyes thinks it’s non-existent, while Stephen Guess discusses the terminological inexactitude surrounding the “socialist” charge, and its ideological implications.

Looking beyond election day, Gary Sauer-Thompson thinks the Republicans will be reduced to a Southern and Western rump. In this context, it’ll be interesting to see if Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays loses his seat. Shays is the last GOP House member left in New England, and the only survivor from the wipeout of what remained of the once influential liberal and moderate Republicans of the North-East after the 2006 election. But the South is changing too, and Sasha Abramsky examines how the GOP’s lock on the region could be broken tomorrow. Firedoglake assesses the prospects for a Senate super-majority in the South, which is the battleground for some of the last close seats to take the Democrats close to a filibuster proof majority of 60. That majority would include Joe Lieberman, though he’s not flavour of the month among the Senate Dems (or anyone else bar John McCain, probably).

And if Sarah Palin wants to be the GOP’s standard bearer after a McCain defeat, it might be worth having a squizzy at her bizarre religious affiliations and why she’s just outed herself as a Klingon. One thing is for sure – the Republicans and the noise machine won’t take defeat lying down.

Related post: What to watch and what to expect.

Update: Some interesting links from Xeni at Boing Boing, including an election FAQ.

James Ridgeway at Comment is Free looks at the structural barriers to change Obama will face (including those within the Democratic party).

Update: An interesting post from Jon Perr on the “character war” waged against Democrats.

But, while the possibility that the Republicans could win can’t absolutely be excluded, it certainly is worthwhile posing the question of what happens if they do in fact lose.

Jonathan Freedland is one who has been thinking about where the GOP goes under an Obama presidency, and he makes quite an interesting case that Sarah Palin could position herself as a potential 2012 frontrunner. This is interesting for at least two reasons. First, Palin’s selection – among all the other obvious reasons – was a reflection of the failure of the “conservative movement” to produce a convincing Presidential candidate in the first place. One of the real stories of the swing away from the Republicans is the exhaustion and fracturing of many of the activist factions that were on a roll from the late 90s until just a few years ago. Secondly, it might explain some of the stories about friction between McCain himself and Palin over her tactics in this race recently.

It’s fairly unusual for a candidate to have such a sustained run of momentum so deep into the campaign cycle. And it does appear to be real momentum, with some real feedback loops: the worse McCain’s poll numbers become, the more desperate his campaign looks, and the more desperate his campaign looks, the worse his poll numbers become.

McCain now has to go on a run of his own, a large enough run to wipe at least 8 points off of Obama’s lead, and perhaps more like 9 or 10 to cover his inferior position in the Electoral College and the votes that Obama is banking in early and absentee balloting. It is imperative that McCain does not just draw tomorrow night’s debate, does not just win a victory on points, but emerges with a resounding victory, the sort that leaves the spin room gasping for air.

There’s always the possibility that McCain might make the “one term” promise that’s supposed to have been tossed around in his campaign for a long time, as a final attempt at one of his crazybrave “game changers”, but with Palin now very much on the nose with independents and swing voters, that doesn’t look too clever. Meanwhile, Obama may have set a bit of a trap for Walnuts by claiming he’s too yella to raise William Ayers to his face. McCain says he’ll bring up Ayers. Given that most people think the Obama hangs with terrsts card is a big downer, except with the more rabid elements of the base and Fox News and the right wing bloggers, this may be a very bad move.

Update [by Mark] Liveblogging at FiveThirtyEight.com, Feministe, Feministing, Crooks & Liars, Think Progress and this girl called automatic win.

[Via Majikthise, but it's just about everywhere on the web - it's so viral it might just be this cycle's Macaca moment.]

Now McCain at least – if not Palin, I think (it’s hard to tell as there appears to be some internal GOP noise dissing Palin), have belatedly taken to hosing down calls of “Bomb Obama!” and “kill him!” at their rallies, often leading to the candidate being booed by the enraged “base”. But it’s pretty clear that this sort of thing stands in a very close relation to the dogwhistling that’s going on at epic volume from the GOP “hate talk express”. All this vileness is leading to more conservatives jumping ship, and a hollerback from a supposed “McCain adviser”, Congressman John Lewis.

I really hope that this stuff gets repudiated at the ballot box, and goes down the tube with McCain’s shattered reputation (and incidentally, I’m somewhat bamboozled that some local observers seem inclined to give McCain the benefit of the doubt.) The politics of division has revealed its true face.

Elsewhere: More from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion. Some more incidents of ugliness here and here.

A couple of discussion starters – Nate Silver:

Are John McCain’s negative attacks succeeding in eating into some of Barack Obama’s support? They certainly aren’t yet. In fact, Barack Obama has had perhaps his strongest individual polling day of the year.

And my favourite blogger evah (well, up there anyway!), Michael Bérubé:

…if the first debate is any indication, Obama’s going to go for the cool deflection, not the red-hot direct reply. In so doing, Obama will no doubt disappoint his partisans who want him to play Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robots with the vast right-wing noise machine. Yes, I know, it’s better to play it cool when your opponent is an incoherent growling curmudgeon and you’re up by eight or nine nationwide. But I do think that McCain is at the boiling point, and that if Obama says anything tonight that calls into question McCain’s one-hundred-percent truthiness and integritocity, or if Obama says anything that suggests that McCain should treat him as a peer (like “as a fellow Senator”), however gently and genteely he says it, the game might finally be over.

Because up to this point, the one thing McCain has been most willing to sacrifice—his reputation for integrity, the backbone of his carefully-crafted public legend—has been the one thing he most fiercely defends. It’s almost as if he knows precisely how much he’s lost in the bargain, and has decided (consciously or unconsciously) to devote his campaign to his own self-destruction: attacking his media base and slingin’ the shit while dedicating himself to a frantic defense of his reputation for country-first integritude and steadfast truth-telling maverickiness. If Obama touches on this dynamic tonight, however lightly, his opponent might implode.

No, it probably won’t happen. But it would be great fun to watch.

Apparently Obama has been consorting with terrorists, because he once knew a member of the Weathermen (long afterwards and when Bill Ayers had become an educator and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago). All these allegations were aired during the primaries – and no doubt the Rev. Wright stuff is being readied for an encore. Reading this article on the campaign in Florida really does show how much dissemination the loathsome “Muslim sleeper” stuff is getting as well, and Palin’s attack on Obama as some sort of terrorist sympathiser will reinforce that theme among those disposed to believe it, or to have doubts.

The flick to a negative posture on the part of McCain’s campaign is a sign of desperation – with the polls consistently showing Obama with a winning lead. By contrast with John Kerry, Obama has been ahead most of the time, with only the most spectacular “game changers” from McCain giving him temporary momentum (Kerry trailed Bush for most of the campaign). With the economy tanking in the wake of the Wall Street crises – and this piece from Robert Reich [via Terry Flew] really spells out what’s going on – we’re about to see whether culture wars really do trump economic issues. This article in The Guardian from the distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett is an intriguing answer to why the culture wars card can still be played.

Haiku’s not the form
For Senator Joe Biden
Because the last line may come out slightly longer than is absolutely necessary due to the subject’s ability to analogize all topics to a seminal moment in the history of this great nation of ours, America, the UNITED states of America

-Henry Alford

So jobs, they … you know,
Health care’s really …. it’s — Katie,
That bridge? I said no.

-David Orr

[Via Quick Study]

Any links to liveblogging of the debate appreciated.

Context in this earlier post and Amanda’s post on Biden at Hoyden About Town.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/biden-palin-debate.jpg"

Update [by Mark]: Liveblogging at Firedoglake, Feministing and FiveThirtyEight.com.