There are three new generic polls out today that do not contain good news for Republicans. Hotline's number among likely voters has gone from a 40% - 40% tie in August, to a 13-point bulge for the Democrats, 46% - 33%. A FOX News release today gives the Dems an 11-point edge (49% - 38%) while Zogby has the Dems ahead 42% - 33%. All of this has bumped the RCP Generic Average back up into double digits, giving Democrats an 11.5% edge. This bounce back for Democrats in the generic numbers may be one of the reasons we have seen such little movement towards Republicans in the contested Senate races.

Alan Dershowitz slams The Guardian in today's Jerusalem Post:

The Guardian, which used to be a liberal British newspaper, has become the full-fledged Pravda of the British hard Left, especially when it comes to its one-sided bashing of Israel. Like Pravda, it will not publish alternative points of view, even when the alternative point of view seeks to correct willful mis-statements of fact. It's gotten to the point where a reader simply cannot trust the credibility of the reporting.

I thought the Beeb already held the mantle of being the "Pravda of the Britsh hard left." I guess if you throw in Robert Fisk's home paper, The Independent, there's enough market share to support three Pravdas in the UK.

There has been some talk in the past few days about the Senate - as opposed to the House - switching hands this year. This is an interesting possibility - counterintuitive to the current conventional wisdom, and therefore, as Mickey Kaus noted this week, a strong candidate for the next conventional wisdom.

Of course, this idea has the advantage of squaring with historical precedence. It is always theoretically more satisfying when the most recent observation falls into line with previous ones. And the history of the Senate and House is that the latter only switches when the former does. I made mention of this in the Spring, but in retrospect I believe I made too much of this point. An important factor in Senate elections, one of which I failed to take full account, are the specific seats on the table. Sometimes the class of Senate seats that are up for a vote strongly favor one party over another. This happened in 1986 - which was an otherwise ho-hum year, except that all of the weak candidates who were swept into office along with Reagan in 1980 faced the electorate without the Gipper at the top of the ticket.

What seems to be driving this new intuition about the Senate? Much of it has to do with Virginia and Tennessee both ostensibly on the table. These are new phenomena, though the only truly surprising result is how poor George Allen has been on the campaign trail thus far. A lot of rust has developed since 2000 when he defeated Robb. As for Tennessee, I received a tip-off about it coming on the table after all the complimentary media profiles of Harold Ford over the course of the summer. The press seemed to have been looking for any excuse to get that race into the game. The fact that the more moderate Bob Corker won the GOP nomination dampened the media's hope that this one would be competitive. However, a few late summer robo-polls and...presto! They were back in business! Of course, just as these two races have emerged, so also have New Jersey and Maryland. Thus, the net number of vulnerable seats has remained constant. So, this inclines me to the suspicion that there is something more than numbers moving people to speculate that the Senate is on the table.

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Gentleman and scholar David Adesnik of Oxblog responds to my post from yesterday with a post of his own questioning the suggestion that "un-smart partisanship is a problem mainly of the left."

A couple of quick points. First, I think David misses the mark by suggesting what I wrote could possibly be interpreted as "invective" (definitions include: 1) vehement or violent denunciation, 2) a railing accusation; vituperation, 3) an insulting or abusive word or expression). I also think he did a bit of disservice by clipping my quote to exclude the two reasons I list that drive a lot of the current partisan anger on the left. My point isn't that it's bad that the most active partisans on the left have been given a voice, but rather that the circumstances under which that voice has been found - the agonizing losses in 2000/2004 and the war in Iraq - have contributed to the tone of the partisan discourse on the left.

Did I mean to imply this type of "un-smart" partisanship is exclusive to the left? Certainly not. And it's not hard to imagine that if the blogosphere had exploded five or ten years earlier, right wing partisans would have been the ones struggling with the problem of managing their visceral dislike - hatred, even - of William Jefferson Clinton. Some still do.

But it's also hard to dispute that if you compare the largest and most highly partisan sites on both the left and the right, there is an obvious difference in style, tone and substance. Markos Moulitsas and Duncan Black seem to revel in the use of obscenities and of ridiculing people who disagree with them with terms like "wankers." Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake tosses around names like "Rape Gurney Joe" to describe Joe Lieberman - not to mention depicts him in blackface - and occasionally uses language so foul it would make a long-haul trucker blush (see her reference to Ana Marie Cox in this post as one example).

Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and the guys at Powerline operate at very high-octane levels of conservative partisanship, to be sure, but they almost always manage to do so within the bounds of reasonable discourse. That doesn't necessarily make their ideas or arguments any "smarter" than the ones that appear on left-wing sites, and they are often criticized - fairly in some cases, unfairly in others, in my opinion - for the partisanship of their views. But you certainly won't see Hugh Hewitt featuring a post on his site titled "Wanker of the Day."

David continues in his post to write something on which we can both agree:

After the discussion was over, I went over to Tom and made the following suggestion. Smart partisanship is partisanship that keeps the interest of the other side. Smart partisanship is something you disagree with, but feel that you have to read because you want to know what the best argument is for the other side.

That's the ideal I keep in my head when I blog. When I write, I keep an imaginary not-me on my shoulder that has the opposite opinion about everything. My goal isn't to get him to agree with me, but to prevent him for saying "This is a waste of time."

Of course, this method hasn't prevented lots of dumb partisanship from showing up on this blog. But I do believe that this ideal has helped make OxBlog a site that attempts to engage its critics rather than one that vents its authors' spleen.

Absolutely. I try to keep up with what Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Chris Bowers, Kevin Drum and others write precisely because they try (for the most part) to make smart, interesting arguments. Hopefully, they continue to read conservative-leaning sites for the same reason.

There is smart partisanship on both sides, though as I said it seems to me there is more of the invective filled, less substantive variety on the left these days. In my view that type of partisanship is easier to dismiss and in some ways counterproductive to goals of the people who practice it. But that's just my opinion.

The Des Moines Register reports on the Dems' big push for early voting through absentee ballots:

More than 50,000 Democrats had requested ballots, according to the Iowa secretary of state's office as of Wednesday, compared with just more than 11,000 Republicans, continuing a trend by Democrats in Iowa of emphasizing early voting.

However, later on we read this:

In the past two statewide elections, Democrats have run up early leads with absentee votes.

In 2002, they held on to win the governorship, re-electing Tom Vilsack.

However, their early-voting edge was erased in 2004, when President Bush carried the state in his re-election bid.

"A large part of our effort is turnout," said Cullen Sheehan, executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa. "We're trying to get Republicans to vote.

"If they do it early, that's great. Our success has been to get people out on Election Day."

The Iowa Governor's race between Republican Jim Nussle and Democrat Chet Culver is an absolute dead heat right now.

A new Keystone Poll in Pennsylvania 6 has Rep. Jim Gerlach ahead 44% - 41% among likely voters. This follows on the back of a partisan poll by Public Opinion Strategies showing Gerlach ahead by 11 points. Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum trails in all of the polls in his Senate race, which is what you would expect for the most vulnerable incumbent Senator this cycle. Gerlach is certainly one of the top five House incumbents the Democrats are targeting; and this latest poll showing him running ahead of Lois Murphy is not exactly good news for their overall prospects of winning the House.

Jim Gerlach's is rated the most vulnerable House incumbent on RCP's list and is #1 on the Hotline's Chuck Todd's list as well. If the Democrats expect to take over the House, this is a seat they probably have to win. If Gerlach is 50/50 to win on election day, Democrats are going to be hard pressed to net the 15 seats they need for control.

The recent polling evidence continues to support the point I made earlier this week (which the New York Times echoes today) that the Senate increasingly looks like a better opportunity for Democrats.

Senator Joe Lieberman leads by 10 points, 49% - 39%, over the Democrat Ned Lamont in a poll released this morning from Quinnipiac University. Poll Director Douglas Schwartz says: ""Ned Lamont has lost momentum. He's gained only two points in six weeks. He's going to have to do something different in the next six weeks or Sen. Joseph Lieberman stays in for another six years." In our opinion Lamont peaked about a week before the August primary and has been slowly losing altitude ever since. Ironically, it was Lieberman who came out of the primary with momentum which was hugely important as it served to mute the bump Lamont would have been expected to receive for pulling off the improbable upset.

The number that I find so problematic for Ned Lamont is 5%. That is the horserace number that the Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger has in this latest Quinnipiac. The other polling firms that have the Lieberman-Lamont horserace closer than Quinnipiac still have Schlesinger in the 3% - 7% range; Schlesinger's RCP Avg is 5%. Republicans and registered Independents make up over 65% of the electorate in Connecticut, and given Lieberman won 48% in the Democratic primary, Lamont is going to be very hard pressed to outgun Lieberman when the entire electorate will be voting in November.

The RCP Average in this race shows Lieberman ahead by 6.7%. Pundits can talk all they want about the anti-war sentiment in the Northeast and how Lieberman will lack the party infrastructure so important to getting the vote out, at the end of the day if the Republican nominee can't get into double-figures it is going to be very hard for Ned Lamont to win.

Good news (for a change) for George Allen in his Virginia Senate race. In the first poll in a couple of weeks, a new poll by SurveyUSA for WUSA-TV Washington DC and WDBJ-TV Roanoke gives Allen a five-point lead, 49% - 44%. All things considered this has to be seen as good news for the Allen campaign given the recent news coverage. The poll was taken Sunday - Tuesday while the latest scuttlebutt over accusations that he used the N-word in the 1970's was hitting in the media. Each individual day's polling was all over the place so it is clear there is a tremendous amount of volatility in this race.

But given the news flow for Allen the past month, the fact that Webb has actually lost ground from SurveyUSA's poll taken August 18-20 is not great news for his ultimate prospects in November. Webb can't expect the news flow/press coverage to continue to be this favorable from his point of view from here until the election, especially with Allen having the money to get his message up on air to counter a Washington media that is overwhelmingly hostile to his candidacy. I don't think the Allen people can breath easy though, this is only one poll and I'll be interested to see where some more polling pegs this race.

Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Ben Cardin brought in one of the biggest guns in the country for an endorsement :

"You gotta put this guy in the Senate," [Barack] Obama told a crowd of several hundred at the University of Maryland in the home county of the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black.

With the crowd chanting "U-ni-ty," Cardin appeared with several black officials from Maryland, including Mfume, the former congressman who lost to Cardin in a crowded primary on Sept. 12.

It's interesting to note that the event was staged in College Park and that Reuters reports there were only a "few black voters in the mostly white crowd." That would seem to suggest that the Cardin camp feels Obama's appeal is at least as great among liberal white suburbanites as it is with African-American voters.

Reuters:

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house canceled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.

"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."