Twilight Zone
Linked here almost solely because of its opening line, this piece from the Wall Street Journal Web site:
The prize for "Twilight Zone" race of 2008 – the one that defies all logic unless you forget everything you thought you knew before – may go to the Senate contest in North Carolina.
It echoes something that Charlie Cook said during his appearance at Elon earlier this week:
"The last year and half, at least in terms of the presidential (race), I have felt like to the extent that the more you study voting patterns and election behavior and the more you know about presidential voting history, I think the bigger impediment it's been for the last year and a half. ...To me it's been a year where it's as if you took the rule book and just tossed it out."
Kind of reminds you of that old saying about what happens when you ass-u-me.
That Wall Street Journal piece goes on to describe all of Sen. Elizabeth Dole's Washington bona fides and why that should have given her a leg up here. That, of course, betrays the very Washington mindset that a U.S. Senate seat is a national office. While true to an extent, it's still voters in North Carolina that will determine the race.
What has Katherine Rizzo (the writer of the WSJ story) and Cook and other Washington-based analysts confused is that the campaigns for president, U.S. Senator and some other races have come unhinged from the national norms, at least over the summer. Regional and state-level factors -- local economic conditions, who knows who being shipped out to Iraq, what named storm is blowing through where -- are dominating voter thinking rather than any one single national drumbeat.
That’s not to say things won’t snap back into line at some point. In fact, over at the left-leaning blog "Facing South," Chris Kromm suggests Obama is pulling out of some Southern states where he’s invested resources, which would be a big nod to "historical voting patterns."
