Here at Bears Will Attack we are concerned about the direction of this great land. We are concerned about the hatchet-men, the embezzlers, the paid assassins, the yes-men, the moneylenders in the temple, the thieves, wastrels, idolaters, crankcases, killjoys, puritans, moralizers, poor spellers, goblin-faced hacks and spenders of blood money.

To combat these dire forces, we have marshaled our not-inconsiderable talents to shine a light into the darkness, in the form of this web-log. We hope it proves enlightening.

Questions? Comments? Diatribes? Email BWA.

5:38 pm | New York City

'Election Day' Edition (UPDATE)

We have managed to get our hyperactive jittering under control by forcing ourself to read the National Review blog online and a number of people who have posted very sobering and dull-minded things about the NOTORIOUS UNRELIABILITY of early exit polls. A good example of this is today's post by Mystery Pollster:

We are all intensely curious about what is going to happen tonight, and most of us will find a way to peek at leaked exit polls at some point today. I just want you to know that those leaked exit polls really don't tell us much more about the outcome of the race than the telephone polls we were obsessing over just a few hours ago. Even if we wanted to call a race on unweighted, unfinished, mid-day exit polls alone (something the networks will not do), we would need to see differences of 10-15 points separating the candidates to be 95% certain of a winner.

That having been said, the continued flood of numbers looks outstanding for the forces of truth and justice. Being only a very low-grade blogger ourself, we have no idea if these numbers are actual exit polls, internal tracking numbers being released by the Kerry campaign, early voter numbers, or some complicated and unreliable amalgam of all these things.

What is clear, even to the respectable media, is that voter turnout is very high across the country, possibly to record levels. All indications are that this is good for the Kerry campaign. We think is telling that even partisan handicappers agree that the more Americans get out and vote, the worse that is for the president.

We have heard, however, that turnout among NEW voters is not any higher than it has been in recent elections. This saddens us, and gives lie to the efforts of many outstanding punk-rock musicians. We hope tomorrow's more-concrete numbers prove this to be false.

In other news, this heartwarming email arrived moments ago at BWA Campaign Blog headquarters from alert reader James Johnson:

dear mr. will attack,

i just had a sandwich
a carrot
and a tiny snickers bar
and now my stomach feels all gurgglie
did karl rove do that?

also, i had an awsome conversation
with an older black lady today
while we waited to vote
we talked about how we hated george bush
and how we pretty much liked kerry
and how we really missed bill clinton
she said clinton was the best president because
"he always looked at you
like he knew you was going home with him"

i laughed like a monkey

We hope that Bubba's weak heart is strengthened tonight by what we hope will be a thwomping of the Bush administration. Godspeed, Mr. Clinton, wherever you are.

3:40 pm | New York City

'Election Day' Edition (UPDATE)

We are beside ourself, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, struggling mightily to keep down our excitement level over the current exit polls floating through the blogosphere. Yes, early voting tends to skew heavily female, who tend to vote Democratic. Yes, the bulk of the pre-Election Day voting was for Kerry, which may be reflected in these numbers. Yes, Karl Rove, like a water moccasin, is still a danger until you see his body lying in the tall grass without a head.

But the thought of the surging, fog-clouded electorate handing down a massive repudiation of the president and every wrong-headed idea he stands for gets our blood going.

We recieved a flood of emails while we were at lunch, commenting on this very idea. Christian Scanniello, former roommate and Washington DC resident, shares our excitement:

I'm beginning to think that this might not be that close after all! I am allowing myself to get this excited...if only for the reason that I want to feel unabashedly good about my country for at least one day in the event that the nightmare (re)happens. But these numbers are crazy!

Mr. Scanniello also pointed us toward the heart-warming spectacle of red-blooded conservatives getting all twitchy and mad. From the heartland, East-Coaster-in-exile Kevin Fanning tipped us off to some indecipherable good news about the price of gold:

Well I don't want to fan too strongly the flames of enthusiasm, but Jeff Speight just told me that the price of gold is down $7, and that this is a good early predictor that Kerry will win, but that the reasons why are too arcane and boring for a layperson like me. So anyways, that's possible good news.

Our plan for tonight is to attend an Election Night party at a bar in Brooklyn where a friend of ours works. We wanted to be sure there was strong drink on hand, to deaden any pain that we might feel in the event of a catastrophe, but now we are congratulating our foresight for selecting a venue that will allow us to celebrate in style.

Not that a celebration is guaranteed. Certainly not. But it would be lovely if the hammer-rain came down, and the president and his contemptible pack of false-hearted worms were caught in the open. We await the coming of the night.

2:27 pm | New York City

'Election Day' Edition (UPDATE)

You go to hell, Jim Rutenberg. More whining from the respectable media:

Web Offers Hefty Voice to Critics of Mainstream Journalists

In other news, Wonkette is posting what appear to be exit poll results, or possibly some early returns. (The Blogosphere is not noted for its attention to contextual details). Assuming these numbers hold any meaning at all, they look good for the forces of righteousness and truth, as they show Kerry up in such contested states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and New Mexico.

Speaking of whining, the respectable media have been carping all day about how they intend to hold exit poll results until the polls close, but they can do nothing about the wild-eyed, drunken bloggers. Despite resenting the implications of this, we actually tend to side with the establishment on this issue. However, although we once worked for the now-disgraced and disbanded VNS (Voter News Service), we currently lack much in the way of insider connections, so it is an ethical dilemma we are unlikely to face, here at the BWA Campaign Blog.

1:15 pm | New York City

'Election Day' Edition (UPDATE)

All is quiet on the western front. We continue to watch the wires, valiantly. Do not thank us, alert readers. The work is its own reward.

Lacking any hard news, we return to our old friends in the useless, jabbering commentariat. E.J. Dionne vilified the president today in his usual high-minded fashion:

The best he can hope for is a narrow victory that will leave the nation bitter, divided and angry. One of Bush's achievements will be exceptional voter turnout and a renewal of the idea that elections and political parties matter. The downside, for him at least, is that a large share of the country has been activated for the primary purpose of ending his presidency.

Also in today's Washington Post, George Will (whose writing and political analysis we admire, even though we understand that he is a bowtie-wearing tightass) makes several observations worth noting:

Watch Maine's 2nd Congressional District. Maine, like Nebraska, allocates an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. Kerry will win Maine, but Bush could win the 2nd. Watch Ohio. If Bush carries the state hit hardest by job losses, can we retire the canard that Americans "vote their pocketbooks''? Many issues often trump banal calculations of short-term material well-being.

So watch the black vote. If, as several pre-election polls suggested, Bush doubles the 9 percent of African American votes he won in 2000, it will be partly because efforts were made, especially on black radio, to use Bush's stance on same-sex marriage to appeal to the black community's cultural conservatism.

And Andrew Sullivan makes an excellent point about the 2004 phenomenon of significant early voting and exit polls, one which we hope the networks have taken note of:

Doesn't such heavy early voting somewhat undermine the exit polls? If, in some areas, like Florida, there has been extensive early voting, and most of it skewed Democrat, wouldn't that make the exit polls look more pro-Bush than the votes might actually be?

There are vast, spectacular amounts of gibberish out there today, and we admit that we are compelled to read enormous chunks of it. We will try our hardest not to inflict much of it on you.

11:45 am | New York City

'Election Day' Edition

Welcome to the last draw, alert readers. We spent the morning waiting in a long and tedious line at Public School 51 in order to exercise our franchise. We were not vexed, however, but were made glad by the sight of so many of our neighbors, most of whom were sporting pro-Kerry buttons on their jackets. Granted, we live in an fairly affluent neighborhood in New York City, so we can draw no useful political conclusions from this, but it was heartening all the same.

One of the more hateful traits of our current administration is their constant indirect insinuation that all true patriots support their ruinous and divisive policies, and those who disagree are somehow less American for it. Seeing a gymnasium full of people of all shapes and sizes, from young people to wizened grandmothers, waiting patiently to cast their vote against the president and see him driven from power like the cheap idealogue he is, was an uplifting experience.

Alert reader and blogger-in-arms Jeff Simmermon addressed the "long lines" issue this morning:

I was a little scared this morning because the line at my polling place was out the door, around the corner and halfway down the street. Whenever Americans see lines that long and cannot hear a roller coaster, we get worried. I was terrified that I'd wait in line for like two hours and then find out that everyone was lined up for Springsteen tickets.

The national polls are as deadlocked as they've been all week, with Bush generally up by a couple points. In the major battleground polls, however, Kerry seems to be ahead in the majority of swing states. No one will be reporting any exit polls for some time, and we suspect the respectable media will be fairly gun-shy on that sort of thing this year, so it will be a long day of crossed fingers. We encourage our readers to have strong drink on hand, and prepare for the worst.

10:34 am | Brooklyn NY

'Down to the Wire' Edition

We spent much of Sunday evening trolling the internet, reading wildly conflicting data from all corners of the union. The respectable media, who have been enjoying themselves immensely for weeks now, cannot even agree on which factors are the most significant. We have looked deep into the churning heart of the American political maelstrom, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, and we have learned only that MSNBC's Campbell Brown is a stone-cold fox, and we would not mind tabulating her early-election results, if you catch our drift. Aside from that, we are at a loss.

Given the bewildering and useless array of polls available, we have stopped paying much attention to the numbers, although we continue to consult Zogby's tracking polls, which we prefer for no particularly good reason.

Zogby shows Kerry up in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Bush up in Nevada, Ohio and Colorado. This bodes well for Kerry, if you buy the argument being made by the professionals that whoever takes two of the 'Big Three' battleground states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida) will take the election. These numbers may prove to be hideously, laughably wrong, however, and Mr. Zogby may be drummmed out of modern American politics like a crippled animal. Or Nader may cover the spread in Wisconsin, throwing the race to Bush. Or Rove may bring the fire down in south Florida, and the streets will run like rivers with the blood of the unrighteous. We have no way of knowing.

In the national polls out today, three show Bush in the lead, two show Kerry in the lead, and two show a tie. The electoral vote counts are similarly schizophrenic. (For a fairly lucid explanation of the Electoral Collage and it's arcane mysteries, visit Heck's Kitchen and scroll down for the original essay by Eric Webster).

Official BWA Campaign Blog Endorsement

Although we strive for a detached air of cool, professional remove, we suspect that many of our more alert readers will have detected a bias against the president and his marauding press-gang of amoral, treacherous man-pigs. However, we have refrained from saying anything remotely friendly about Mr. Kerry, except to observe that he performed like a thoroughbred Arabian stallion in the debates, and we admired his nerve.

Yesterday we watched Alexandra Pelosi's documentary about the Democratic primaries, and much to our surprise, we found Kerry to be far more normal and likeable than we had hitherto been led to believe by his surrogates and commercials and posters and press releases and vast piles of poll-tested drivel. With this in mind, we can endorse his candidacy with no reseverations, aside from a lingering fondness for Howard Dean.

It will be a long couple of days, and the skies will be black as night before they are clear, and the rivers will turn to mud, and cats will lie down with dogs. We are glad you are with us, alert readers, here at the end of all things.

2:34 pm | New York City

There is little else we can do, from this point. The train has left the tracks, and is careening downhill through the dead brown fields. We urge our readers to leap clear at the last possible moment, and watch the explosion while drinking the cheaper sort of whiskey.

We will not even feign any interest in the numbers today. Political Wire points out that four years ago, the major polls had Bush up 7 points over Gore on the Sunday before Election Day, which proved to be no harbinger of things to come.

Your weekend reading assignment from the BWA Campaign Blog is the following memo from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, currently being pushed on the media by the Kerry campaign:

Date: October 30, 2004
To: Interested parties
From: Stan Greenberg
RE: RACE STABLE ON FINAL WEEKEND
Review of public and overnight polls

To give some perspective on the race in its final weekend, we might recall what Wolf Blitzer said on the day before the election, 2000: “And now, let’s take a look at the latest poll numbers. The new CNN/USA Gallup Tracking Poll results are being released at this hour. It shows George W. Bush with 48 percent, Al Gore 43 percent, Ralph Nader with 4 percent, Pat Buchanan with 1 percent. And those numbers are similar to other tracking polls,” going on to cite the Bush lead in polls for ABC, Washington Post, NBC-Wall Street Journal, CBS and MSNBC-Reuters-Zogby.

In fact, the public polls in 2004 show a remarkably stable and dead-locked race, with Bush stuck somewhere between 47 and 48 percent, short of what an incumbent should have to secure re-election.

The Democracy Corps has a new poll, conducted Friday night and Saturday morning. While the full survey will be completed on Sunday, the half-sample of 500 interviews conducted after the release of the Bin Laden tape, show the race unchanged compared to a survey completed Thursday night. The partial survey shows Kerry at 48 percent and Bush at 47 percent. Like the survey conducted before, it shows the two parties with equal numbers of party identifiers.

The stability in this poll reflects the overall stability of the race for president. This past week, George Bush polled 47.9 percent as the average of the public polls. That represents only a .5 point change compared to the prior week. Indeed, if one looks at the polls released Saturday and including polling after the release of the Bin Laden tape, Bush’s vote stands at 48 percent in one (Newsweek), 47 percent in one (Fox), and 46 percent in two (Zogby/Reuters and TIPP). That is a weaker result than for the polls released earlier in the week and prior to last weekend.

(These results are based on the results for registered, when available, as that is consistent across polls and has been a better predictor of the final outcome.)

Kerry’s vote was also stable at 46.4 percent on average, up .1 percent compared to the previous week. That is a dead-even race, where the undecided will play the final role, as they almost always break heavily against the incumbent.

Bottom line, amidst the intensity of campaign’s final days, it is important to keep one’s eye on the stability and structure of this race, with Bush still short of what he needs to win.

We hope everyone got all that. 77 hours and counting.

1:05 pm | New York City

We have given up on watching tracking polls, even major battleground ones. Every time we feel certain about a state, it goes all waffly on us. To hell with them. We recommend that interested readers visit the Electoral Vote Predictor, an excellent website that is updated daily.

Oddly enough, there is little to report today. Blah blah missing explosives, blah blah overall job losses, blah blah battleground states, blah blah catastrophic revelations of cocaine parties with underage hookers over the weekend. We've seen it all before.

Along with our lack of enlightened commentary today comes a faltering of faith. We are an armchair political analyst at best, but our finest instincts for these things tell us that the smart money is on Kerry. Our gut tells us the same, although without the halting caution of our instincts. Out gut loved Howard Dean, Bill Clinton and George McGovern, and it hates to lose the big ones.

If the president and his band of humorless brutes should win on Tuesday night, you will hear an ugly rumble from the coasts, not to mention of the overwrought invective you will be able to read on this web-journal.

We are hopeful, but we are also fearful. Democrats are terminal losers, and they are often stupid, and Karl Rove is still there, coiled like a mandrake in his throbbing bed of slime, plotting the ruin of the American Way and daydreaming of crippled men and falling buildings. He is a known eyebiter, and when moving through the fields, you must be on your guard the most at the very end, where the rattlers hide. We are brave, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, but we fear the things we cannot see.

The Atlantic Monthly discussed Rove's gifts in this month's issue:

How Rove has conducted himself while winning campaigns is a subject of no small controversy in political circles. It is frequently said of him, in hushed tones when political folks are doing the talking, that he leaves a trail of damage in his wake—a reference to the substantial number of people who have been hurt, politically and personally, through their encounters with him. Rove's reputation for winning is eclipsed only by his reputation for ruthlessness, and examples abound of his apparent willingness to cross moral and ethical lines.

If we were a more 'rah-rah' sort of web-log, we would urge our alert readers to get out and support the candidate they believe in, here in the final hours. As it is, we will simply suggest that you have strong drink on hand when the hammer comes down.

2:10 pm | New York City

There is a vast, worrisome cloud of fraud, treachery and uncertainty hanging over the land today, as the president ditches his blue shirts for suits, Kerry goes on and on about baseball, and the editorial staff of the BWA Campaign Blog returns to New York City to wait out the end.

Despite our valiant efforts to present "composite" polls yesterday, the LA Times undermined our efforts by reporting Bush moving strongly ahead in Florida, Kerry moving strongly ahead in Ohio, and a dead heat in Pennsylvania. We don't buy that last one, but then again, what do we know? New Jersey remains deadlocked by all accounts, and the Kerry campaign is moving people back into Arkansas and West Virginia. The Hotline Scoreboard of electoral votes moved several battleground states BACK into the "disputed" column, putting Bush in the lead, but still well below the magic number of 270.

We are heady with anticipation.

We confess that we are bereft of all wisdom, here at the BWA Campaign Blog. We would still put our money on Kerry, based on a host of clever factors, including voter registration numbers, percentages from the Zogby polls, the fact that we know lots of people who use cell phones instead of published land-lines, the Red Sox victory, messages from beyond, a dream we had about a horse that could drive a motorcycle and tidal patterns. But we are aware that our professional judgement is obscured by our visceral dislike of President Bush and his press-gang of amoral thugs and power-junkies, who continue to fan the flames of resentment and fear in order to drive rural cultural conservatives to the polls and keep college kids and urban black people from voting. Harold Meyerson addressed this sentiment yesterday:

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still believe in voting rights.

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against itself in the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable Republican majority. The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself the standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant cosmopolitans.

Several of our more Republican-leaning friends will sniff at this, and accuse us of harboring conpiracy theories. We have never been one to buy into the more wild-eyed ranting of the paranoid left, but at this point we would not take ANY ODDS on bets that fanged hordes of lawyers will not descend on county clerk's offices in Ohio and Florida to contest votes by the truckload.

It has become fashionable among the respectable media to constantly mention the hope that the election is clean and above-board, and provides us with a clear winner come Wednesday morning. This is our hope as well, but we have seen the dark clouds wheeling like ink-spills, and carrion birds gathering in the east. It will be a long night, we fear, and a host of ugly days will follow.

4:32 pm | Washington DC

'Battleground Polls' Edition

Frustrated with the unreliable poll numbers emerging from respectable news media, the BWA Campaign Blog boldly undertook a massive and noble effort to distill some sort of wisdom from the data pile. We present our findings today:

NATIONAL
Bush: 47
Kerry: 46

Although these numbers have Bush slightly up, we are still buying into the political science argument that undecided voters will tend to break for the non-incumbent. And, as we have noted before, a national poll is nice, but we do not have a national election in a meaningful sense, so to hell with it.

And now for 'The Big Three' battleground states:

FLORIDA (Bush +1)
Bush: 47.8
Kerry: 46.8

PENNSYLVANIA (Kerry +4.6)
Bush: 45.8
Kerry: 50.4

OHIO (Bush +0.25)
Bush: 47.5
Kerry: 47.25

The conventional wisdom among the commentariat is that Kerry cannot win without Pennsylvania, but he seems to have that one well in hand. Bush is just slightly ahead in the other two major battlegrounds, although the president's people are predicting a Florida victory. We imagine that they could predict the final vote count down to the tenth decimal point in Florida, so this does not come as a great shock to us.

There are between five and eight other states that are considered to be serious contests. We were unable to collect a meaningful pile of numbers for all of them, but things are looking close all over.

WISCONSIN (Bush +1)
Bush: 47.2
Kerry: 46.2

IOWA (Bush +6)
Bush: 52
Kerry: 46

MICHIGAN (Kerry +5.5)
Bush: 43
Kerry: 48.5

MISSOURI (Bush +3.4)
Bush: 48.4
Kerry: 45

NEW JERSEY (Kerry +1)
Bush: 48
Kerry: 49

This may all be a fool's errand, as the new "cool" thing to predict among the respectable media is a significant break one way or the other on the very brink of Election Day. Lacking any reliable fortune-telling or scrying devices, we are forced to watch these stupid tracking polls.

------

METHODOLOGY: Although we have some access to "media-only" poll numbers, the vast majority of these are available online. All of the numbers above are composites of between three (3) and seven (7) public tracking polls published in the last two days.

POLLS: The following polls were used in compiling these numbers: Zogby, SurveyUSA, Rasmussen, American Research Group, Gallup, Insider Advantage, WPLG-TV (Miami), Keystone, Democracy Corps, Annenberg, Quinnipiac, Knight Ridder, NBC News, Mitchell Research, Research 2000, KAET-TV (Arizona), Detroit Free Press, Washington Post

4:49 pm | Washington DC

We have been back in DC this week, in the very heart of the machine. The drumbeats continue to pound along the Potomac, there are black double-rotor helicopters overhead, and the vice-president described our ill-starred adventure in Iraq as "a remarkable success story." This is either a dire warning of the bad craziness that awaits us over the next seven days or a hopeful sign that the incumbent ticket has utterly lost their way, and considers the race sewn up enough to knock off and spend the weekend in Crawford.

We are made of sterner stuff, however, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, and our primary concern, at this late hour, is to get some side bets going. We suffer from a case of "true-believerism", however, which skews our odds-making abilities badly. Currently we would take Kerry and a four-point spread. We'll come up with an electoral vote spread as soon as we can do the math.

The numbers coming out of reputable polling organizations are so bad that we have stopped paying attention altogether, although we should note that Kerry's leads earlier in the week have evaporated to some Bush leads. Most, if not all, of these discrepancies, however, are not only within the margins of error, they are rendered irrelevant by sampling errors and conflicting polling methods. For a far more erudite explanation of this phenomenon, check out Mystery Pollster:

What in the world is going on here? Two words: Sampling Error.

Try this experiment. Copy all of the results from any one of these surveys for the last two weeks into a spreadsheet. Calculate the average overall result for each candidate. Now check to see if any result for any candidate on any day falls outside of the reported margin of error for that survey for either candidate. I have -- for all four surveys -- and I see no result beyond the margin of error.

The BWA Campaign Blog is chiefly watching battleground polls at this point, as the national tracking polls were giving us motion-sickness. We will check in tomorrow with a round-up of our favorite sets of numbers on such Campaign 2004 all-stars as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and, yes, Arkansas!

5:26 pm | Washington DC

'Beginning of the End' Edition

"Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what's to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals' lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms."

-- Des Moines Register

The wires were humming like addicts today, with news of horrific, Jerry-Bruckheimer-style mass killings in Iraq, the failing health of William Rehnquist, surging poll numbers, wild-eyed attacks from the presidential candidates, and the triumphant, shining return of Bill Clinton before a cheering crowd of 120,000 people. We prefer to remain above the heartless partisan fray as often as possible, but we could not help but hope that Bubba's winning appearance caused painful heartburn in certain circles.

What really lit our wicks, however, was Al Gore, aflame with righteous indignation as he hurled harsh and sinister epithets at the president. We were not paying attention at the exact moment that Gore became the Demoratic Party's weird, unlikely hell-preacher, but if anyone has photos of it, please send them our way.

Also, if anyone caught Bob Novak jabbering like an escaped convict with the opium shakes on Crossfire today, you will understand the disdain with which we continue to view this shambling wraith of a man. He should be jailed on general principles.

The numbers continue to jerk wildly back and forth across the narrow threshold between wisdom and error, with the more honest pollsters admitting that they have no idea what they are even looking for. The electoral votes appear to have swung toward Kerry for the first time, at least according to the sources we are relying most heavily on here at the BWA Campaign Blog:

Electoral Vote Count (Hotline Scoreboard)
Kerry: 243 (18 states)
Bush: 234 (28 states)

Contested: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Ohio

Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Eric Black derided these predictions, throwing caution and all pretense of omniscience to the uncaring wind:

There are too many moving parts in the Electoral College to make a reliable projection of the electoral votes.

The Los Angeles Times, which publishes a daily projection based on the latest polls, currently shows Kerry leading in 10 states plus the District of Columbia with a combined electoral vote of 153, Bush leading in 21 states with a combined 158 electoral votes and 19 states up for grabs with a combined 227 electoral votes.

That means there are more than enough tossup states to turn the final outcome into a rout for either side or a nail-biter that won't be decided until weeks after Election Day.

It's a knife-storm of Old Testament proportions, and anyone who tells you that they know how which way the hammer's going to come down is either a hustler or a half-wit, but we would put our chips on Kerry today if we were up against the wall, and we are not rich enough to throw money away.

5:12 pm | New York City

It's a dark and pitiless day here in New York. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in a heated and bizarre series of baseball games, and the news has cast a darksome cloud over the city. However, the news is not without its silver lining, as alert reader James Johnson observed:

Dear Mr. Will Attack,
I know that you now claim to be a New Yorker
but you are first and foremost a Roanoker,
and Roanokers love underdogs.
So I am disappointed that you have not cheered
the amazing comeback story
of the Boston Redsocks.

now, I'm not a huge sports fan,
but I have noticed an interesting trend:
1. the Lakers lost this year
2. the Yankees lost this year
3. John "The Closer" Kerry has tightened his race

I think this may be a bad year for big corporate evil,
and a good year for funny looking underdogs
with hearts of gold

As someone who lives in New York City, and wishes to continue kissing on New York girls, as well as riding the subway unmolested, we are unable to publicly agree with Mr. Johnson. However, we do like an underdog story, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, and we do share his desire to see the president get beat like a three-dollar mule in every state of the union except Texas and Utah.

Our friend Jenny Miller made a similar point today on her excellent blog:

Well, the books were wrong on the Sox, and they'll be wrong on Kerry, too. You can still lay $100 to win $160 right now (Bush is $100 to win $50). People, I'm tellin' ya, when Boston comes back from 3 games down to win the series (only the first time a team's done that in 101 years), it can only mean Bush is going down. Trust Jenny the Greek™.

Note: The BWA Campaign Blog does not endorse gambling in any form, especially if you're just going for the spread. That's the coward's way out.

And in other news, we can recommend this nifty Electoral College Calculator, even though we found it on ABC's The Note, which we generally avoid for professional reasons.

6:55 pm | New York City

"The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about."

-- Hunter Thompson

The election is less than two weeks away, and the merciless engines of the presidential campaigns are gearing down into the final, brual stretch. We will hear terrible, appalling things before the end. Bush and his vile coterie of Rotarian thugs will accuse Kerry of fear-mongering, pandering, treachery, wife-swapping and drug abuse. Kerry and the bagmen at the DNC, half-wired on adrenaline and excitement, will respond in kind, telling the nation that Bush has sold us out. Which is true, more or less.

The national polls continue to hew closely to the middle, typically coming out even or a point or two up for the president. The electoral vote counts are beginning to widen up, however, and some are starting to pull in Kerry's favor:

Electoral Vote Predictor: Kerry 284, Bush 247
The Hotline: Bush 227, Kerry 214
2.004k.com: Kerry 289, Bush 232
Slate: Kerry 284, Bush 254
Race 2004: Kerry 218, Bush 205
MyDD: Kerry 316, Bush 222
(from Political Wire)

Remember, 270 is the magic number needed for someone wishing to measure the Oval Office windows for drapes.

And, warming our cold, calculating heart to the very edges, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the world's greatest political writer and our personal hero, returned to form this month with a long-winded screed against Bush, Ralph Nader, the respectable media and Richard Nixon, in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine:

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful...I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Bush is not quite the enemy that Nixon was. He is less outwardly evil and dangerous; his failures and betrayals are of a shabbier, meaner sort. Still, the return of the good doctor heartens us, here in the the teeth of the winter.