Dear Mr. Mullings:
Are you still claiming that the GOP will hold onto the US House, or have you finally gotten back on your meds?
You know? I'm glad you asked that. You would have to be living in Kazakhstan watching the evening news hosted by Borat Sagdiyev to believe Tuesday is going to be a glorious night for the Republican Party.
The breathless predictions in the Popular Press this past weekend in trying to convince us that election day will not just leave the GOP as the minority party, but as a minor party may be, as they say, premature.
There's a reason they actually hold the elections.
While you might not have seen this on the front page of your local paper, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a poll on Saturday which showed the generic vote among likely voters has closed to 47% - 43% in favor of Democrats.
The specific question was:
"If the 2006 elections for U.S. Congress were being held TODAY, would you vote for the Republican Party's candidate or the Democratic Party's candidate for Congress in your district?"
NOTE: To try and get as clear a result as possible, the order of the parties (Republican or Democrat) were reversed for half the sample)
The Pew polls are not known as a Republican-leaning activities. In fact, there have been complaints among Republicans that Pew tends toward samples which lean Democratic.
In this poll, which included 2,368 registered voters of whom 1,795 were deemed "likely" voters - which are the only ones we care about with 36 hours to go.
The party split in the survey was 34% Republican, 34% Democrat and 27% independent.
The generic vote in the Pew poll in September was 40-53 Democrat among likely voters.
In the October poll the difference had narrowed from minus 13 to minus 11, statistically insignificant.
But last week the deficit in the generic vote narrowed to just FOUR percentage points.
It is an axiom that Republican candidates for Congress tend to outperform the pre-election polling as to generic vote by 3-5 percentage points. If that holds with this latest survey, the GOP might play to a draw on Tuesday.