I'm going to stop looking at the polls. We're down to thinking fluctuations of one or two points matter when in fact, they're all just "noise" and well within the margin of error. You could get some deadly form of ping-pong whiplash looking at the Senate race in Minnesota: Franken's up two points, Coleman's up one, Franken's up one, Coleman's up three, etc. That one could easily go either way and no poll today or tomorrow is going to change that. (It may rain Tuesday in Minnesota. None of the polls have even tried to determine if maybe one candidate's supporters are less likely to go out in the rain to vote for him.)
You should stop looking at polls and you should especially stop looking at Zogby. Mr. Zogby seems like a nice, serious man when I see him interviewed but his poll has achieved something, at least with me, that is rare in this world. I not only don't believe him when he has my candidates behind. Everyone does that to some extent. I don't even believe him when he shows my candidates winning. Zogby's been so consistently random and erratic that when his polls tell me something I want to have be so, I can't even gin up a little, "Well, maybe he got this one right."
We have many hundreds of entries in our little prizeless contest to guess Barack Obama's electoral total. You still have time to enter or change your guess (I'm sticking with 349) and the details are here. Guesses made so far range from 0 to 538 and there are possible numbers no one has guessed so take a chance. This is your golden opportunity to win nothing.
I did receive one complaint that it showed "hidden bias" that I was asking folks to predict Obama's total and not McCain's…or maybe the correspondent thought I should ask you to predict both. There's no hidden bias here. I've said I think Obama would be a much better Chief Exec than John McCain and I have an Obama-Biden banner posted, as well. And predicting Obama's total is the same thing as predicting McCain's since together, they'll total 538. Mr. Barr and Mr. Nader ain't cutting into that number. I just picked Obama because I had to pick one…and anyway, his total looks to be the more interesting of the two.