Well, about three-quarters of it, given that perhaps 25% or so have voted early.

Go here for the excellent poetry from Just Blowing Smoke’s Timothy Higgins.

I might add:

As the number of ballots stacked up and were mounting,
Recall what one guy said about who does the counting.

On target:

This is ominous, and corroborates the effects of a provision in ObamaCare documented in several places over the past several months.

Doug Ross reports that a Kroger manager has relayed the following information to him (bolds are mine):
(more…)

Though it occupies four web pages, it’s hard to avoid thinking that Alex Isenstadt at Politico is hoping news consumers only look at his story’s headline (“Democrats’ drive to retake House falters”) and not its damning yet still woefully incomplete content.

The headline would make you think that Dems will gain seats, but not enough to achieve a majority. Isenstadt bravely concludes early on that “Democrats are expected to pick up five seats at best … (and) might even lose ground and drop one or two seats to the Republican majority. But the rest of his writeup virtually screams “double-digit losses,” and fails in several respects to properly assign blame for what appears to be an impending Democratic Party debacle (bolds are mine):

(more…)

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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From Denver:

Nov 3, 2012 / 12:02 pm (CNA).- A group of lay Catholics in Colorado is placing a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of the Denver Post to drive home the importance of religious freedom in the upcoming election.

“I think the folks who organized getting the ad together want to ensure everybody understands what’s at stake not only for the Church, but for the country, when religious liberty is compromised,” said J.D. Flynn, chancellor of the Denver archdiocese.

The full-page ad, which will run in the Sunday, Nov. 4 edition of The Denver Post, will feature the full text of the Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila’s Nov. 1 letter on religious freedom and the election.

Flynn said that purchasing the ad in the Sunday edition, which reaches 964,000 readers, “isn’t cheap,” but the fact that over 20 Denver-area Catholics committed to fund it shows that they “support the archbishop in his public ministry.”

“I just think it speaks to the quality and commitment of the lay people in the Archdiocese of Denver that they want to support the archbishop in this way,” he commented.

Flynn said he hopes this advertisement will highlight the importance of protecting religious liberty in the Nov. 6 presidential election.

“Our country is the product of religious liberty,” Flynn stated. “When we undermine that for something as short-sighted as free contraception, everybody is in serious trouble.

“I just hope people are hearing that.”

The idea for the advertisement was the result of a group of lay Catholics asking how they could support the archbishop in his efforts to uphold religious liberty. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Yours truly’s post on the lame Million Puppet March over at NewsBusters was linked by Drudge Sunday afternoon (“‘Million Puppet March’ Draws ‘Hundreds’…”) — and still is, as of this moment.

Nice.

UPDATE, Nov. 5, 8 p.m., then 11:30 p.m.: The link is still there. I’m stunned. It actually remained until early a.m. Tuesday. Here’s the last saved Drudge Archive shot.

A month ago, when the Columbus Dispatch claimed that its ridiculous nine-point, 51%-42% lead for the incumbent in the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in Ohio showed that “Romney first must turn around his own campaign,” I wrote that what the paper had really demonstrated is that the race was tied. The 43%-35% Democratic Party skew explained virtually all if not more of the Obama margin. No one believes that this breakdown reflects what we’ll see among voters on Election Night.

Today’s Dispatch poll shows Obama with a two-point, 50%-48% lead, causing the paper to declare the race a toss-up. Though its sample is less skewed (40.0%-36.7% Dem-GOP in the presidential race, 40.6%-36.4% in the presidential race), its results really foretell a Romney victory in the race for the Buckeye State’s 18 electoral votes by at least the 2.8-point margin currently shown at uskewedpolls.com while rendering the race between incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Josh Mandel a true toss-up.

Here are the key elements of the poll’s chart:

Besides the obvious partisan skew, there are a few other distortions.

Percentage of early voters. Slightly less than half of those surveyed by the Dispatch said that they had voted already or said they would before Election Day. That isn’t what’s happening on the ground. As of this evening, according to Gannett, 1.6 million Ohioans have already cast ballots. Even if that figure is missing the last few days of early voting, it’s unlikely that more than 1.9 million Ohioans, or one-third of the 2008 turnout of 5.7 million, voted early. The relevance is that the early voters polled by the Dispatch favored Obama by about 13 points; this component of Obama’s support is clearly overstated. It makes sense that it would be overstated, as one would expect people who set out to vote early to be more likely to answer mail surveys like the Dispatch’s.

Regional components. Let’s look at the swings in the Dispatch poll from late September to late October:

• Northeast (over one-third of the sample, reflecting its component of the population): From 59-34 Obama to 54-44 Obama, narrowing Obama’s lead by 15 points. If Obama really fails to come out of Northeast Ohio with more than a 10-point cushion, he’s a virtual lock to lose Ohio.
• Central: From 51-42 Obama to 52-47 Obama, narrowing Obama’s lead by 4 points.
• Western: From 55-41 Romney to 58-41 Romney, a three-point Romney pickup.
• Southwest: From 55-35 Romney to 61-38 Romney, a three-point Romney pickup. Soutwestern Ohio, with less than 10% of all respondents, is probably underrepresented in each poll.
• Northwest: From 59-35 Obama to 51-47 Romney, a 28-point swing (only about 100 respondents each time, which is not enough to conclude on, but stunning nonetheless).

The lone remaining region, the Southeast, only made up about 3.5% of each polls’ respondents. If there’s hidden GOP strength on Election Night, it will come from this region if voters from these traditionally Democratic areas are as upset as they should be about Barack Obama’s war on coal.

Dispatch Polls’ history. The Dispatch poll, as is the case with so many other polling operations, has consistently shown lower Democratic Party candidate victory margins, smaller GOP candidate margins, and has occasionally missed its call as to who would win. Examples:

• In 2008, it called the presidential race for Obama over John McCain by 6 points. The final result was a 4.5-point Obama victory. That difference alone, if repeated this time around and even before considering other factors, moves this year’s race from a 2-point Obama victory to virtually zero.
• In 2004, it said that the Bush 43-John Kerry contest was tied. Bush won by two points.
• Other races down the ticket have historically shown much larger variances. Its 2010 performance in missing the statewide races by an average of four points (each time underestimating GOP strength and incorrectly predicting the Attorney General’s race) wasn’t nearly as bad as its 2006 disaster (average miss of 12.5 points while blowing the call in the Auditor’s race). This should provide some additional comfort for Mandel as he confronts the six-point deficit the Dispatch claims he faces, especially considering it overestimated Brown’s victory margin over Mike DeWine in 2006 by 12 points.

All of the above, plus the plethora of data cited by Weapons of Mass Discussion blogger Matt Hurley over at FrontPage Magazine about the vast improvement in the GOP’s get-out-the-vote effort this time around compared to 2008, point to a sufficiently convincing Romney victory in Ohio and a likely squeaker breaking in Mandel’s favor.