One beef I have with Scott is that he is at the mercy of every bogus poll out there. The SUSA that had McCaskill +9 has thrown off the MO race. Also, he has decided to use Charlie Cook's Constituent Dynamics after all.

Grrrr

As I told Powerline's Scott Johnson, Mr. Elliott lost me when he said "On Tuesday, Minnesota CD-6 went blue."

I live in MN-6 & the only poll showing Wetterling leading Bachmann is the Strib's Minnesota Poll. As I wrote here, that poll isn't worth the cyberspace it's stored in.

The truth is that, as someone who's working in the St. Cloud Victory Office, Wetterling hasn't lead in this race since her nomination.

I'd also recommend that you check out the BachmannvWetterling blog for the real facts on that race.

The Minnesota Poll is a disgrace. September's edition of the MP showed Amy Klobuchar, a major tax-increasing, let's pull out of Iraq soon, weak on crime liberal, garnering a supposed 27% of the conservative vote. Please. She'd be lucky to get 27 conservatives to vote for her statewide, much less 27% of conservatives.

Suffice it to say that I'm not impressed with Mr. Elliot's appraisals if he's writing stuff like that.

Gary,
What Scott does is do computations based on a formula that has been quite accurate in the past. When he said it "went blue", that was according to his objective formula, at that moment in time. When it goes back to red he will say that. In addition to the formula, he also shares his opinion of the ways things look headed, even when they don't match what his formula is showing at the time. This adjusts for bad polls, and other variables. He has been busy with the hard numbers lately and has not done as much writing about his opinions on where things stand, but I expect he will be doing that before the election.

I would encourage readers to check it out and decide for themselves whether or not the information he has compiled at Election Projection is something they find useful.

I agree with Lorie. I couldn't disagree with Scott's politics more, but I gave him money (despite the fact that I almost never check the "subscriber" section, because he deserves to be paid for the work he's doing. At least he does his best to be un-biased.

Btw I LOVE when people claim that possibly competitive races are not. Like those who say that it's all the media making things competitive and that MO and TN aren't close. Well sure the gop could easily hold both, but that doesn't mean the races aren't competitive. Same with the Wetterling race in MN. It's great that you live there and read a conservative blog detailing the race (or maybe you work for that blog?), but that doesn't mean you KNOW what's going to happen. Maybe you've talked to a few hundred people or POSSIBLY a thousand (which would be A LOT, and also don't forget I'm sure you're more likely to talk to conservatives than liberals, be they as targeted voters, attendees of an event you're at, or your friends). But there are 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of people in a given CD, and there's no way you can KNOW what will happen until election day, especially in a year like this.

I'm not saying Wetterling will win--she's probably an underdog right now. Maybe she'll lose by 10. Doubtful but possible. All I'm saying is that it's ridiculous when people come on conservative blogs and talk about how this race or that race is over when every reputable pundit disagrees. I remember 6 months back, people on poli were saying unequivocally that AR and CO were easy gop holds. Right now I don't know if I'd give the gop 25% of holding either let alone both.