Absentee ballots mailed out this weekk in Rensselaer County, New York gave voters the option of voting for “Barack Osama.” Both Democratic and Republican election officials insist that it was simply a typo.

The latest McCain ad ignores Wright, Rezko, and Ayers and instead accuses Obama of a single, supposedly disqualifying, grievance: Being liberal. But I argue over at Ablogistan that this assumes too much and, after this election (assuming Obama holds onto his lead and wins), Republicans are going to finally come to the realization that “liberal” isn’t the dirty word it once was. It may just be a generational thing. Being liberal picked up a very negative connotation from “culture...

We seem to be seeing the same trend as after the first presidential debate and the VP debate: Pundits and political junkies saw it as a tie, but voters in snap polls give the edge to the Democratic candidate. The results from about 500 uncommitted voters surveyed by CBS: Who won the debate? 39% say Obama, 27% McCain, 35% rate it a tie. How did the debate impact vote preferences? 15% say they are now committed to Obama, 14% to McCain and 70% are still uncommitted. Candidates rated – would...

This is the only town-hall style debate where audience members are allowed to ask questions, so some are wondering how the audience members were selected. Mark Blumenthal has the answer. Participants were selected with the help of Gallup based on the pollster’s criteria for “likely voters” and with the intent of finding people who mirrored Nashville’s undecided voter population. Gallup’s Frank Newport explains what that means for the final result: This is a population...

The conservative blogosphere gave us a preview today of what tomorrow’s post-debate talking points and spin will sound like. The short version: It’s Gwen Ifill’s fault. The problem, apparently, is a “pro-Obama” book she plans on releasing on Inauguration Day that led Matt Drudge and other bloggers to question her objectivity as the moderator of tomorrow’s VP debate. I skeptically use quotations because the book is about how the black political structure of the...

The Guardian contrasts public reactions from the two presidential candidates. The McCain campaign responded the way a lot of politicians responded today—by assigning blame (and taking no responsibility). The response from economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin: From the minute John McCain suspended his campaign and arrived in Washington to address this crisis, he was attacked by the Democratic leadership: Senators Obama and Reid, Speaker Pelosi and others. Their partisan attacks were an effort...

There are already some numbers coming in measuring perceptions about who “won” tonight’s presidential debate. To start, CBS News polled 500 uncommitted voters and found: 40% thought Obama won, 22% thought McCain won, and the rest thought it was a draw 46% said their opinion of Obama got better tonight 68% think Obama would make the right decisions about the economy, compared to 42% for John McCain 55% think McCain would make the right decisions about Iraq, compared to 49% for Obama MediaCurves...

Some liberal bloggers have been floating the idea that McCain’s “suspend the campaign” stunt was really basically an elaborate attempt to distract people from Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric that began running last night. Now, I initially dismissed this as paranoia and still don’t think it is even close to the primary reason for McCain’s actions. But the more I watch of the interview, the easier it is to believe that some McCain staffers heard her answers...

Here’s why I can’t view McCain’s plan to suspend his campaign and return to Washington until the economic crisis is fixed with anything but cynicism: He hasn’t voted in the Senate since April 10, more than five months ago. To be fair, Obama has missed a lot of votes as well. But McCain has missed 64% of votes in the 110th Congress to Obama’s 46%. And while the current economic crisis presents a very unique situation, McCain has missed some pretty major pieces of legislation,...

Obama gave one of the clearest, most substantive explanations of the election (by either candidate) about what “changing Washington” means in Green Bay yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t laced heavily with attacks on McCain or soundbites and therefore got very little coverage (even on political blogs). But if you’re interested in actual issues and plans, give it a watch. He divided the speech into three sections: Political reforms, government reforms, and regulatory reforms....

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how John McCain essentially drove a wedge between rural and urban America with the Sarah Palin pick and the overall tone of the RNC. And although I still think that is one of the biggest strategic benefits she brings to the ticket, a new poll from the Center for Rural Strategies suggests he still has some work to do to win rural voters by the margins he needs. Not that he isn’t ahead. McCain leads Obama 51%-41% in the survey of 13 swing states. But that isn’t...

There have been a couple of interesting studies published in the last week that may shed some light on why, despite promises for clean and issues-based campaigns, our elections always turn to gutter politics. The short answer: It works. First, from ABC news: In the study, released Thursday in the journal Science, Rice University professor of political science John Alford and his colleagues studied 46 subjects with strong political beliefs. They subjected these people to startling stimuli then compared...

In today’s political climate, it’s a bit of a risk to invest money in a two-minute ad about policy issues. But Obama’s latest ad about his economic policy may be just what he needs, precisely because of the serious tone. Viewers may or may not pay attention to the details, but the sober and substantive tone contrasts sharply with the negative, and sometimes silly, ads run by McCain (i.e., “Paris Hilton” and “Lipstick on a Pig”). On the surface, voters may...

If there ever was a doubt that a lie repeated often enough can supplant the truth in people’s perceptions of reality, take a look at the two graphs below. The first is from the Tax Policy Center and compares the after-income effects of the McCain and Obama tax proposals. Now, take a look at what Americans believe each candidate’s tax proposal will do: Although only 1% of Americans will see an actual tax increase under Obama’s plan, 53% believe he will increase their taxes. I...

Democrats have a trump card up their sleeve this year that could possibly win the election (or at least shift the momentum in Obama’s favor), and they either don’t know it or they for some reason are unwilling to play it. From the New York Times: Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall. Before the summer recess,...

Plenty has been said about the McCain camp’s exploitation of this whole lipstick-on-a-pig thing—it’s petty, it’s divisive, and it’s not the type of political conversation this country needs right now. I’m not going to get much further into that, but you can read some of my thoughts over at Ablogistan. The media’s culpability in the whole matter, however, is something worth exploring more, because this sort of things happens every election season. Controversies...

I was surprised at how hard Republicans hit Obama on taxes last week. Of all the problems that have been on voters’ minds in the last few months—Iraq, health care, the housing market, gas prices, etc.—I would guess that high taxes are pretty low on the list of concerns. And it seems like an easy enough issue for Obama to counter. Most Amercians would receive a bigger income tax break under his plan than McCain’s, and if you’re going to argue that tax cuts will spur economic...

In speech after speech at last week’s RNC, Republicans argued that one of Sarah Palin’s virtues as a candidate is her upbringing in a small town. It was a way for voters to connect with her and at the same time provided an opportunity to attack Obama for the cardinal sin of being too “cosmopolitan” (a phrase uttered without irony by the former mayor of one of the biggest cities in the world). This is, at its core, political pandering and another type of identity politics....

I know, Sarah Palin is a Washington outsider with no direct ties to the current administration. In that sense, she does represent a clean break from George W. Bush. But when you get past the narrative and look at her positions on actual issues, she’s much closer to Bush ideologically than McCain is. The Palin pick was designed to fire up the segment of the Republican party that has always had the most enthusiasm for Bush: social conservatives (i.e., the Christian right). She has succeeded in...

Ezra Klein raises an interesting point in response to McCain’s assertion that Obama’s health care plan “will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.” Money quote: I should say, of course, that not only isn’t this true, but it’s nonsensical … here’s the question I’d love to see John McCain asked: “Senator McCain, can...

This is either an unfortunate truth about politics today or an accidental behind-the-scenes glimpse at McCain’s campaign strategy. From The Fix: Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning. “This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these...

That’s how Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfieffer, described the Gallup Daily tracking poll when discussing the campaign’s polling strategy. I think he’s being a little hyperbolic—but only because several bad things have happened to journalism and it isn’t fair to give the Gallup Daily all the credit. He’s right to point out that there’s too much focus (from pundits and journalists in particular) on snapshot polls without taking into account...

One of the big questions on Democrats’ minds when it became apparent that Barack Obama would be the nominee was how he would handle the 527 attack ads in the fall. Many Democrats blame John Kerry’s 2004 loss on his lack of response to the independently-funded Swift Boat ads, and some had reservations about whether Obama’s promise of a “new kind of politics” would allow for a proper response. Well, his first test comes from the American Issues Project, which as Joe noted...