Secrecy and Lies: The Rightwing Targets America

By JIM RUTENBERG, DON VAN NATTA Jr. and MIKE McINTIRE in the NYT:

Like many of the other groups with anodyne names engaged in the battle to control Congress, it does not have to identify its donors, keeping them — and their possible motivations — shrouded from the public. ...

Through interviews with top Republican contributors and strategists, as well as a review of public records, some contours of this financing effort — including how donors are lured with the promise of anonymity — are starting to come into view.

In part, political operatives have reconstituted the vanguard of reliable Republican contributors who helped elect George W. Bush and support Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked the Vietnam record of his opponent in 2004, Senator John Kerry. But as with the American Future Fund, the effort also appears to include business interests focused on specific races.

NYT: 73 percent disapprove of Congressional Republicans

NYT:

Voters have a darker view of Congressional Republicans than of Democrats, with 63 percent disapproving of Democrats and 73 percent disapproving of Republicans. But with less than two months remaining until Election Day, there are few signs that Democrats have made gains persuading Americans that they should keep control of Congress.

“I really think we need to get some new blood in there,” said Kathy Beckman, 44, an optometrist from Lodi, Calif., who spoke in an interview after participating in the poll. “Get them all out.”

Dem Strategist Hits Electoral Wave Hype

- Must reading for those afraid the electorate has lost its collective mind -

By Andrew Levison at the Democratic Strategist

... The horse race model is based on the image of two candidates in competition for office and assumes that most voters are continually listening to and evaluating information about the candidates and are therefore very strongly influenced by campaign events like party conventions and televised debates as well as by the daily news headlines. In one formal model in political psychology -- called the 'online processing' model -- voters are visualized as keeping a constantly updated running tally of their impressions of both candidates. ...

No GOP Cong Takeover, Says Political Sage

Update: NYT/CBS Poll: 30 percent favorable view of GOP in Congress; 47 percent favorable view of Dems. By margin of 52 percent to 27 percent, Americans say Obama better on health care reform than GOP. Hope everyone gets past the misleading headline, "In Poll, Public Wary of Obama on War and Health."

Those fretting that a rightwing takeover of Congress in 2010 is on the horizon ought not to worry.

So says Alan I. Abramowitz in his Why a Repeat of 1994 Is Highly Unlikely.

Abramowitz has been spot-on is his bold political predictions the last several election cycles, most notably predicting the 2008 Democratic rout of Republicans. He notes that today's electorate is very different than it was in 1994.

Writes Abramowitz:

But while there are some important similarities between the current political situation and the circumstances that preceded the 1994 Republican victory, there are important differences between the makeup of the American electorate now and the makeup of the American electorate then, differences that make a repeat of the 1994 outcome highly unlikely.

GOP Gains Modest in 2010, Say Political Insiders

A desperate Republican Party base that wants it country back from the black man elected president won't get much good news from next year's election.

The 2010 off-year elections, generally presenting a loss for the Party in power, will feature tiny gains for the GOP at most, a majority of political insiders in the National Journal say in a new poll.

The poll was conducted by James A. Barnes and Peter Bell.

All U.S. Representatives and one third of U.S. Senators are up for election every two years.

As the worst recession since the Great Depression perhaps subsides next year, the Democratic Party is seen by most as suffering minimal losses.

Ninety-nine percent of Democratic insiders and 94 percent of GOP insiders polled see no chance to a moderate chance of the GOP taking control of the House of Representatives.

Eighty-six percent of Democratic insiders and 55 percent of GOP insiders polled see either a net Democratic gain or a GOP pick-up of only one to two seats in the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate.

As a political brand, the Republican Party remains damaged.

It is seen as shrill, paranoid and out-of-touch as more scholarly conservatives scramble "to disassociate themselves from Birthers, WorldNetDaily, and other objectively crazy people," in the words of Ed Kilgore.