Rasmussen joins the McDonnell landslide stampede

Rasmussen‘s final Virginia poll is out, and it has McDonnell ahead by a 54-41 margin.  Oddly enough, this puts them at the small end of the McDonnell spread (The WaPo has the smallest McDonnell lead at 11 points).

This is the point, though: all of the major pollsters have McDonnell up by double digits with roughly a week to go.

I liked what I saw

From the Wizards, that is.

For starters, they went into Dallas – a team that won 50 games last year, then improved during the off-season – and held them to under 40% from the floor.  Sure, Josh Howard was out, but Shawn Marion wasn’t.  This was a team that some people are saying could take the Southwest Division away from San Antonio.  Yet the ‘Zards held the lead for the entire second half, taking every run the Mavs threw at them, refusing to panic or wilt, and thus opened the season with a W for the first time in four years.

Caution is the word of the day after one game, but if Agent Zero can stay healthy, and this team can make this kind of defensive performance the norm, this could be a special basketball season in Washington – and it couldn’t have come soon enough!

PPP: McDonnell up 15 (UPDATE: Survey USA has GOP landslide sweep, too)

A week is a lifetime in politics, but Creigh Deeds may need a couple of Resident Evil films to pull this one out.

Public Policy Polling affirms what the rest of the polling world has been saying: Bob McDonnell’s lead has been growing (from 12 points to 15).

Interestingly, the largest lead is still held by Ken Cuccinelli (who stands at +16); Bill Bolling stands at +12.

The best region for the GOP (by area code) is 540, i.e., north-central Virginia for the most part.  That certainly makes me smile.

UPDATE: Survey USA has the margins at 17, 14, and 16, respectively.  Jason @ BD has the details.

Amidst the election fun (including my own campaign), it should be noted that the NBA opens tonight

As just about the only fellow in the Virginia rightosphere who blogs about the Association, I couldn’t let Opening Night go by without a mention.

Once I put the little guy to bed (it will be waaaaaay to dark to hit doors by then), I’ll be watching Agent Zero and company take on the Mavs, while hoping really hard that he doesn’t get hurt).

Deeds could pick up a point a day . . . and still lose

With eight days to go, the Washington Post is forced to admit that their candidate – Creigh Deeds – is down 11 points to Bob McDonnell (55-44).

Even better from the Republican’s perspective, only 2 percent of his voters think there’s a “good chance” they’d change their minds – meaning 53-54% of the electorate is basically “locked in” for him.

If these voters are prepared to stay with the R all the way down the ballot (including *cough* Board of Supervisor races *cough*), it could be a very good night for th GOP.

Survey USA internals showing the Dems are doing what they need to do – and are still getting waxed

The more one looks at the Survey USA bombshell poll, the worse things look for the Democrats.

Here are the big numbers:

Governor: McDonnell 59, Deeds 40

Lieutenant Governor: Bolling 56, Wagner 42

Attorney General: Cuccinelli 56, Shannon 41

Now for the real painful info (for the Dems): since the last Survey USA poll (two weeks ago), the electorate has become less Republican (+1 from +5), more Obama-friendly (McCain +1 from +8), poorer, darker (75% white from 78%, 16% A-A from 15%), and  flipped from pro-life to pro-choice.

Yet all three Republican candidates improved on their previous performance.

In other words, for every Democrat Deeds is rousing to get to the polls, he and his ticketmates are losing two independents (McDonnell’s margin among independents is 44 points).

Meanwhile, Public Policy Polling (the North Carolinians with a heavily Dem client base) is previewing its poll for tomorrow:

We’re looking at a McCain +6 electorate this year in a state that was Obama +6 last year. There’s no path to victory if that stays true through election day. We’ll see how much good the visits from Obama, Bill Clinton, and other leading national Democrats do in the last few weeks but there is a lot of ground to make up (emphasis added).

Not sure if PPP will have a gap this wide, but it’s pretty clear Deeds’ “closing in” days have been closed out.

By my count . . .

. . . we’ve seen three errors in tonight’s game by . . . the umpires.  Two in the Yankees’ favor (4th and 5th), and one in the Angels’ favor (4th).  Luckily, the first two (in the fourth) cancelled each other out, while the Yanks couldn’t benefit from the third one (in the top of the 5th); i.e., there have been no umpire unearned runs.

Trouble is, we’re only halfway through.

Wilder throws cold water all over Deeds’ scare campaign

Creigh Deeds’ entire campaign for Governor is based on scaring voters to death about Bob McDonnell. Said strategy (which has hardly proven successfulas it is) took another hit courtesy of Doug Wilder (TPM):

Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder (D) says he trusts voters to make the right choice in two weeks, and would be just fine with Bob McDonnell (R) leading Virginia.

“The world won’t come to an end, Virginia won’t sink into the seas,” Wilder told TPMDC in an interview.

In other words, Creigh Deeds is full of it.

Wilder refused to say who will earn (or has earned) his vote, but he did add a few things that could only make McDonnell smile:

. . . Wilder also doesn’t like that Deeds has said tax increases are on the table to fix Virginia’s transportation problems.

“I’m very concerned about that,” Wilder said.

. . .

The former governor who also served as mayor of Richmond until recently, said the election in part is a referendum on the ailing economy.

“The public is not stupid. They know they don’t have jobs,” he said.

Ouch!

Two weeks until E-Day.

Comic relief from the Washington Post

The Washington Post has announced its endorsements for Governor and Lieutenant Governor in Virginia.  While there were a few of us (OK, me) who thought it possible the WaPo might cover its pro-Deeds tracks in Bolling’s favor, the decision of the paper’s editors to endorse both Democrats is hardly surprising.  It is, however, very amusing.

Two segments (one from each editorial) were particularly good for laughs.

From the Deeds endorsement:

Our differences with (Bob McDonnell) are on questions of policy. The clamor surrounding his graduate dissertation from 1989, in which he disparaged working women, homosexuals, “fornicators” and others of whom he disapproved, has tended to obscure rather than illuminate fair questions about the sort of governor he would make.

Really?  One would think the Post would be upset the folks who rammed the thesis down everyone’s throats for months.  Oh, wait . . .

Then there’s the LG editorial.  Check this out:

As the only one of the six statewide candidates to have had hands-on experience with the state’s budget, (Wagner) would be uniquely well placed to serve as a resource for whichever candidate is elected governor.

Well, at least they got “uniquely” right: she is the only Finance Secretary who oversaw revenue projections that were off by a record $7 billion!

I eagerly await the fun that will come with the Post‘s AG decision.

McDonnell’s lead holding

Rasmussen‘s latest poll has McDonnell up seven points (50-43), virtually unchanged from the 51-42 margin of two weeks ago.  Even the internals have seen little or no movement in two weeks.

Of course, we still have three weeks to go – and you know what they say (correctly) about a week in politics – but for McDonnell, this sure beats the alternative.