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• Miller’s broadcast ads have by and large steered clear of mentioning Robinson by name. But when I got around to checking my mailbox on Sunday morning (yeah, I’m slow) Miller had dropped a direct mail piece on the district that goes right at Robinson and his commercials.

• I saw both Robinson’s and Miller’s television ads at my house over the weekend, which leads me to believe we’re going to see them up through the end of the campaign. From a tactical standpoint, what is interesting here is that Miller and Robinson are both able to stay on the air. If Robinson was able to broadcast without Miller pushing back, that might let him gain some more ground - or visa versa.

• I have still not seen anything by way of reliable independent polling focused on this district. That doesn’t mean a whole lot other than pollsters have not considered the race close enough based on their generic ballots to dig deeper.

• Robinson’s campaign was circulating an e-mail late last week this story in on the CQ Politics site, which put the 13th in a “Democratic Favored” district rather than a “Democratic Safe.” Robinson has said for the past few months that he’s making inroads into a district that heavily favors Democrats in terms of voter registration.

  However, a closer reading of the CQ shouldn’t get Republicans all that excited. The race mainly switched columns because of Robinson’s fund raising prowess and CQ still calls an upset “highly unlikely.”

I would use the "highly unlikely" label too, but based on different reasons than CQ. Robinson has run a relentless and well-funded campaign, which has given him some pretty good name recognition and mobilized some of the Republican base. In another year with a less popular incumbent, I could see him running neck and neck right now.

But Robinson’s ads have also gotten the Democratic faithful fired up. Local and state Democrats have used Robinson as a foil against which the rank and file can be rallied, a reason to tell voters they must get to the polls. With Democrats totaling 52 percent of the registered voters in the district (compared to 28 percent for the Republicans) the last thing Robinson's campaign wants to do is get into a heads-up turnout battle. But that's exactly what he may be getting.

Robinson also has the misfortune of running in a time when a lot of folks are frustrated with a Republican Congress and a Republican president. The past month has seen a pretty stream of anecdotes and polling that suggest unaffiliated voters are breaking against Republicans in a pretty big way.

I don't do a lot of predictions and I'm not going to do a very firm one now. But back in the spring with a generic Republican candidate starting flat-footed against Miller I would have said the final returns a week from Tuesday would give Miller a victory with a 30 percentage point margin easy (something like 65-to-35 percent). My educated guess now tells me that Miller is still likely to win, with a margin of somewhere around 12 percentage points, plus-or-minus 4.

Have your own educated guess? Leave it in the comments section below.