Latest Senate polling shows Dem. uptick – updated Oct. 1

thanks to John Isaacs

Check out the Council for a Livable World blog “Chain Reaction” for Senate polling updates almost every day: http://blog.livableworld.org/

Senate polling update:  http://blog.livableworld.org/story/2008/9/30/124858/021

During the hot presidential primary season, polling firms focused on presidential primary outcomes and not too much on congressional elections.

Now there are several new polls on Senate races each day that provide a glimpse of the contests.

There are some very interesting developments in the past few days.

Most surprising – a Kentucky poll showing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) dead even with his challenger, businessman Brian Lunsford. This is the second poll in a week showing Lunsford catching up.  It is rare for party leaders to lose re-election battles in their home states, but it happened to Tom Dashle in South Dakota a few years back.

In Georgia, while some polls show incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss with a comfortable lead, two recent polls — one listed below — show a margin of as little as two points.

In another unexpected development, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), who appears to be spending all his time campaigning nationally for John McCain, is now only 9 points ahead of his little known challenger, Bob Conley (D). While no one believes that Graham is seriously threatened, he may have to spend more time before the home folks instead of strolling the country arm-in-arm with John McCain.

In two other Senate contests, Oregon and North Carolina, the Democratic challengers may have taken narrow leads over Republican incumbents.

In fact, political guru Stu Rothenberg has moved the Oregon Senate race to “lean takeover” for Jeff Merkley (D).

Nationally, most polls show Barack Obama with a narrow lead after trailing a couple of weeks ago.

Could there be a similar trend in Senate contests?  Stay tuned, and check back frequently.  This compendium will be undated almost every weekday.

Full polling data after the jump.

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N.B. This listing includes mstly media and public polls; party or candidate polls are generally not used unless other polls are unavailable. This listing also tries to avoid automated polls such as Rasmussen except if there is no alternative or to provide alternative numbers. Because all polls have a margin of error in their numbers, they should be taken as useful indicators at the moment the polling is conducted rather than absolute truth. In some instances, conflicting polls will be provided.  Numbers may not add up to precisely 100% due to rounding.

Alabama
66% – Sen. Jeff Sessions (R)
31% – Vivian Davis Figures (D)
3% – Undecided
Survey USA poll conducted September 16 – 17, 2008 – 655 likely voters

Alaska
47% – Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D)
43% – Sen. Ted Stevens (R)
9% – Undecided, other
Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll conducted September 17 -21, 2008 – 601 likely voters

Colorado
48% – Rep. Mark Udall (D)
40% – ex-Rep. Bob Schaffer (R)
12% – Undecided, other
Quinnipiac/Wall Street Journal poll conducted September 14 – 21, 2008 – 1,418 likely voters

Delaware
69% – Sen. Joseph Biden (D)
26% – Christine O’Donnell (R)
6% – Undecided, other
Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll conducted September 17 -21, 2008 – 601 likely voters

Georgia
46% – Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R)
44% – Jim Martin (D)
10% – Undecided, other
Survey USA poll conducted September 28 – 29, 2008 – 677 likely voters

Idaho
56% – Lt. Gov. James Risch (R)
33% – ex-Rep. Larry LaRocco (D)
11% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted September 16 – 17, 2008 for Daily Kos – 500 likely voters

Illlinois
56% – Sen. Dick Durbin (D)
35% – Steve Sauerberg (R)
9% – Undecided
Research 2000 poll conducted September 15 – 18 for St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV – 800 likely voters

Iowa
54% – Sen. Tom Harkin (D)
40% – Christopher Reed (R)
6% – Undecided
Rasmussen poll conducted September 25, 2008 – 700 likely voters

Kansas
55% – Sen. Pat Roberts (R)
35% – former Rep. Jim Slattery (D)
10% – Undecided
SurveyUSA poll conducted September 21 – 22, 2008 – 666 likely voters

Kentucky
45% – Sen. Mitch McConnell (R)
44% – Bruce Lunsford (D)
11% – Undecided, other
Louisville Courier-Journal poll conducted September 22 – 25, 2008 by Mason Dixon – 717 likely voters

Lousiana
46% – Sen. Mary Landrieu (D)
40% – State Treasurer John Kennedy (R)
14% – Undecided
Southern Media and Opinion Research poll conducted June 26 – 28, 2008 – 600 likely voters

Maine
57% – Sen. Susan Collins (R)
38% – Rep. Tom Allen (D)
5% – Undecided
Research 2000 poll conducted September 8-10, 2008 for Daily Kos – 600 likely voters

Michigan
56% – Sen. Carl Levin (D)
28% – state rep. Jack Hoogendyk (R)
16% – Undecided
Detroit News & four television stations poll conducted September 14 – 17, 2008 by EPIC-MRA – 600 likely voters

Massachusetts
65% – Rep. John Kerry (D)
30% – Jeff Beatty (R)
5% – Undecided, other
Rasmussen poll conducted September 23, 2008 – 500 likely voters

Minnesota
49% – Rep. Norm Coleman (R)
42% – Al Franken (D)
9% – Undecided, other
Quinnipiac/Wall Street Journal poll conducted September 14 – 21, 2008 – 1,301 likely voters

Mississippi
48% – Rep. Roger Wicker (R)
43% – ex-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove (D)
9% – Undecided
Research 2000 poll conducted September 8 – 10, 2008 for Daily Kos – 600 likely voters

Montana
64% – Sen. Max Baucus (D)
31% – Mike Lange (R)
6% – Undecided
Rasmussen poll conducted September 7, 2008 – 700 likely voters

Nebraska
56% – ex-Governor Mike Johanns (R)
31% – Scott Kleeb (D)
13% – Undecided
Rasmussen poll conducted July 28, 2008 – 500 likely voters

New Hampshire
52% – Sen. John Sununu (R)
45% – former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D)
3% – Undecided
Rasmussen poll conducted September 23, 2008 – 700 likely voters

50% – former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D)
41% – Sen. John Sununu (R)
9% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted September 22 – 24, 2008 for Concord Monitor – 800 likely voters

New Jersey
51% – Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D)
38% – former Rep. Dick Zimmer (R)
11% – Undecided, other
SurveyUSA poll conducted September 27 -28, 2008 – 611 likely voters

New Mexico
56% – Rep. Tom Udall (D)
41% – Rep. Steve Pearce (R)
3% – Undecided
Survey USA poll conducted September 14 – 16, 2008 for KOB-TV – 671 likely voterss

North Carolina
48% – Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R)
42% – Kay Hagan (D)
10% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted September 8 – 10 , 2008 for DailyKos – 600 likely voters

48% – Kay Hagan (D)
45% – Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R)
7% – Undecided, other
Rasmussen poll conducted September 23 , 2008 – 500 likely voters

Oklahoma
56% – Sen. Jim Inhofe (R)
34% – Andrew Rice (D)
10% undecided
Research 2000 poll conducted September 16 – 18, 2008 for Daily Kos – 600 likely voters

Oregon
45% – Jeff Merkley (D)
40% – Sen. Gordon Smith (R)
15% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted September 22 – 24, 2008 for Daily Kos – 600 likely voters

South Carolina
51% – Sen. Lindsey Graham (R)
42% – Bob Conley (D)
7% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted September 221 – 24, 2008 – 600 likely voters

Tennessee
50% – Sen. Lamar Alexander (R)
26% – Bob Tuke (D)
23% – Undecided
Middle Tennessee State University poll conducted September 15 – 27, 2008 – 635 people

Texas
48% – Sen. John Cornyn (R)
37% – Rick Noriega (D)
16% – Undecided
Rasmussen conducted August 21, 2008 – 500 likely voters

Virginia
61% – ex-Gov. Mark Warner (D)
29% – ex-Gov. Jim Gilmore (R)
10% – Undecided, other
ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted September 18 -21, 2008 – 857 registered voters

West Virginia
61% – Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D)
33% – Jay Wolfe (R)
6% – Undecided, other
Rasmussen conducted September 24, 2008 – 500 likely voters

Wyoming 1
58% – Sen. John Barrasso (R)
34% – Nick Carter (D)
8% – Undecided, other

Wyoming 2
59% – Sen John Enzi (R)
35% – Chris Rothfuss (D)
6% – Undecided, other
Research 2000 poll conducted for both seats September 22 – 24, 2008 for Daily Kos – 500 likely voters

From Iraq to Afghanistan

By:  Peter Deccy

The politicians and pundits agree! Let’s move the quagmire from Iraq to Afghanistan!

After all, Afghanistan is the good war, right? Not the one we were led into with lies and promises of easy victory. We simply can’t let al Queda and the Taliban set up shop again. This is the war we have to win…

This lack of critical assessment is most troubling because it means our nation could lose another four thousand of our sons and daughters and our economy bleed another $600 billion before the American people realize we are locked in another unwinnable occupation.

In the end, just as is the case in Iraq, the Afghan people will still be among the poorest in the world and the Afghan government will still have limited control outside the capital, Kabul with US troops dying just to hold on to that.

Without a legitimate Afghan government in place, chances are we won’t be any more secure than we are today.  And our troops will be seen as foreign occupiers.

Someone in our government should address the charge that the Karzai government is “deeply corrupt and incompetent.”  That phrase, by the way, was drawn from a Washington Post article and attributed to an unnamed source in the Bush administration more comfortable telling the truth when not on the record.

Perhaps this time we should be asking questions about the government we are getting in to bed with and make sure their sins don’t become ours.

Perhaps our elected officials should take a long, hard look at how the fight against the Taliban and other insurgent forces in Afghanistan is costing the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and what that does to our imagine around the world.

Perhaps?  You’d expect that at the minimum before any further American lives and any further treasure are put at risk.

It would be nice to know at least, that our elected officials were aware that the insurgents in Afghanistan are not all Taliban and the problems of controlling the country are not all caused by insurgents.  In fact, so-called warlords run much of the country and their allegiance is to themselves.

In terms of creating a vibrant democracy in Afghanistan, the current, deteriorating political situation is no less daunting than the sectarian divisions that thwart a political settlement in Iraq and perhaps more so.

So as the candidates for the nation’s highest office and the holders of the purse strings in Congress prepare to guide our country into another quagmire with no one challenging the validity of their assumptions, it falls upon us once again to sound the alarm.  And though we are not in the business of developing military and political strategy alternatives for them, Peace Action does have a suggestion.

First, the Afghan war was started on a false premise.  You cannot ‘defeat’ terrorist groups through warfare.  Terrorism isn’t a country or even a movement.  Even small disaffected groups can plan suicide attacks.

Stopping these groups and their tactics requires police methods – good intelligence and international cooperation.  It also requires dealing with the crippling poverty and lack of education and opportunity that feed fanaticism.

Finally, a peace process is needed.  The US will not succeed in imposing a government on Afghanistan. Negotiations with all factions in Afghanistan, including the Taliban and Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and Iran is the best bet for a real solution.

Afghanis are proud they’ve never been conquered.  They fought off the British and the Russian armies and are ready to fight our troops as well for as long as it takes to drive them out.

Peace Action’s “No Soldier Left Behind’ campaign is aimed at bringing political pressure on our elected officials to end the occupation in Iraq.  But we want to return our troops to the warm embrace of those who love them, not send them off to another quagmire.

VP Debates – advice

To Joe Biden: Time for Confession By Ray McGovern September 30, 2008

Dear Senator Biden,

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I don’t have to remind you of the importance of this Thursday’s debate from a political perspective. But as you prepare, I invite you to spare a few minutes to look at the opportunity from a moral and religious perspective.

You may wish to examine your conscience regarding how you have acted on key foreign policy issues and reflect on John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

The holy days of religious traditions serve a very useful purpose, if we but take the time to pause and ponder. I write you on Rosh Hashanah, the first of 10 days focusing on repentance.

In Judaism’s oral tradition Rosh Hashanah is the day when people are held to account. The wicked are “blotted out of the book of the living,” while the righteous are inscribed in the book of life.

Those in the middle are given 10 days to repent, until the holiday of Yom Kippur — the solemn Day of Atonement.

If that has a familiar ring to it, Joe, we heard it in as many words at Mass last Sunday in the first reading, from Ezekiel 18: “If one turns from wickedness and does what is right and just, that one will live.”

Same Tradition

At Rosh Hashanah the ram’s horn trumpet blows to waken us from our slumber and alert us to the coming judgment. Rabbi Michael Lerner has been a ram’s horn for me. On Sept. 28, he sent a note addressing forgiveness and repentance.

He encourages us to find a private place to say aloud how we’ve hurt others, and then to go to them and ask forgiveness.

“Do not mitigate or ‘explain’ — just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness,” says Rabbi Lerner. He suggests we ask for “guidance and strength to rectify those hurts — and to develop the sensitivity to not continue acting in a hurtful way.”

Again, a familiar ring. Think, Joe, about the instruction we both received as Irish “cradle Catholics.” Surely you will remember the emphasis on examining one’s conscience, confessing, and pledging to “sin no more.”

The phrase comes back, clear as a bell; we were to “confess our sins, do penance, and amend our life, Amen.” Remember?

And remember how clean we felt at the end of that therapeutic process? I was reminded of that by the gospel reading from John 1, in which Jesus says of Nathaniel: “Here is a true child of Israel; there is no duplicity in him.”

Just think of how Nathaniel must have felt.

Joe, you can feel that clean; but one cannot short-cut the process. You must first come clean on your role in greasing the skids for President George W. Bush’s war of aggression on Iraq.

I use “war of aggression” advisedly, for that is the term used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to denote “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.”

There is no getting around that — despite the reluctance of church, state and the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to acknowledge it.

I imagine that you, as a lawyer, have moments of acute shame over our country’s flouting of international law and the U.N. Charter, duly ratified by the Senate and thus the law of the land.

And there is no getting away from the important role you played in roping Congress into facilitating that war.

Were the war not to have killed, injured, displaced hundreds of thousands, your lame circumlocutions regarding your own culpability would be laughable — on a par with, say, some of the recent comments of your rival for vice president. But they are in no way funny.

Fulsome Prose

For my own penance, I made myself read again through your marathon, “in-depth” interview with the late Tim Russert on April 29, 2007. Your remarks are notable for two things: (1) periodic sentences that can be diagrammed only by a German philologist with the patience of Job in waiting for verbs and with a deep tolerance for dangling participles; and (2) lies.

It is not hard to spot the lies half-hidden in the underbrush of euphemism and circumlocution.

I do not refer to relatively harmless ones like your firm denial of any interest in running for vice president. I’m talking about the real whoppers — the ones we used to call mortal sins.

Despite the goings-on in Washington in recent years, Joe, I don’t believe anyone has actually passed legislation revoking the commandment against false witness. It’s time you come clean.

–For some reason, you were calling for an invasion of Iraq and making unsupported claims about its “weapons of mass destruction” even before President George W. Bush came into office.

Later, on Aug. 4, 2002, after it had become clear to many of us that Bush was intent on attacking Iraq, you declared that the U.S. was probably going to war. That was three weeks before Vice President Dick Cheney voiced his spurious “intelligence” and set the terms of reference for the war. And it was a month before the administration launched its marketing campaign for the new “product.”

–You became the administration’s most important congressional backer of Bush’s preemptive-with-nothing-to-preempt war advocated by neoconservatives and various oil-thirsty functionaries.

Former U.N. weapons inspector and ex-U.S. Marine Major Scott Ritter was correct in describing the hearings you chaired during the summer and fall of 2002, from which you were careful to exclude Ritter and other expert witnesses, as a “sham…to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

What the country needed was an appropriately skeptical Sen. William Fulbright who listened to dissenters after he got burned on Vietnam. Instead, you took unusual pains to ensure that those dissenting on Iraq would not get a fair hearing.

Ritter: “While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq’s proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament…It is clear that Sen. Biden and his colleagues have no interest in such facts.”

Indeed, just before the Senate voted to give Bush authorization to attack Iraq, Biden plagiarized Cheney in assuring his Senate colleagues that Iraq “possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”

And tell us, Joe, why did you join Sen. John McCain and others in voting against the amendment offered by Sen. Carl Levin that would have forced the president to obtain U.N. Security Council approval before launching war on Iraq?

‘Explaining’ the Unexplainable

–Then, in 2007, when your catastrophic misjudgments were obvious and hundreds of thousands were dead and maimed, you borrowed the administration’s rhetoric to “explain” to Russert how “everyone in the world thought Saddam had them [WMDs].”

That was rank hyperbole. When you added, “The weapons inspectors said he had them,” that was a lie.

Please, no more torturous explanations of the kind you gave Russert, like this one: “It [the resolution] allowed the president to go to war. It did not authorize him to go to it.”

Come on, Joe. The resolution says: “The president is authorized to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.”

Sen. Robert Byrd, who unlike you and some other Democratic senators had no presidential aspirations, rightly observed at the time that those who “voted for a use-of-force resolution handed a ‘blank check’ to the president.”

–When the war/occupation brought bloody chaos, you expressed regret only that the Bush people weren’t doing it right.

For example, in 2004 you told Charlie Rose and in 2007 Russert: “If I’d known that they were going to be so incompetent in using it, I would have never, ever given them the authority.” So you approve of preemptive war as long as no one botches the job?

More recently, Joe, you have said of your vote to authorize the war: “It was a mistake. I regret my vote.”

Pardon the comparison, but you sound like the disgraced Colin Powell, who has expressed regret only for the “blot on my record.” But wait, Joe. “Imagine All the People.”

Im-Palin Old Joe

If you do not find my suggestion for confession and repentance morally compelling, Joe, think of it this way. Your debate partner on Thursday evening will be loaded for bear. I assume you wish to avoid being field dressed.

Ain’t no way out of your dilemma but making a clean breast of it, Joe. She is going to wave her finger at you and quote your fulsome remarks at length — no stranger she to dangling participles.

She will do a John Kerry on you, which worked so well four years ago. You were for the war before you were against it, she will wink. And she will have a field day, if not a field dressing.

I don’t know what your motives were in giving the president permission to attack Iraq — whether it was the neoconservative-cum-Israel-lobby cabal, the Cheney notion that the only way to ensure the supply of foreign oil is to control it, or a calculated move to ensure your viability as a candidate for president (the kind of thinking that turned out to be, deservedly, the kiss of death for Sen. Hillary Clinton).

You had more luck, landing on your feet, sort of.

But you are a “grave and growing” danger (so to speak) to the campaign of Sen. Obama; that is, unless you mount a (God forgive me) “preemptive attack.” And you have only two days — not 10 — in which to do it. It will not wait for Yom Kippur.

And it makes sense from a practical, as well as a moral, point of view.

Here’s What You Do…

Forget the natural inclination to try to defend the indefensible on your cheerleading for the war. To claim you were fooled by the administration, after almost 30 years in the Senate is not going to be any more persuasive or exculpatory than to cite what other pressures you may have yielded to.

Here’s something that might not have occurred to you, since it is a practice that has been out of vogue for so long: Shock everyone by telling the truth! But briefly, please.

Here is some suggested text:

“Gov. Palin, I feel terrible about the role I played in helping President Bush launch this godforsaken war. I confess; it was a terrible decision. I apologize to you and other mothers whose children have been deployed to Iraq, to the nation, to the hundreds of thousands who have died and been injured, to all Americans, to all Iraqis — and I ask for forgiveness. I have learned a painful but powerful lesson; you can count on me never letting that kind of thing happen again.”

Heed Rabbi Lerner’s caution: “Do not mitigate or ‘explain’ — just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness.”

Now, Joe, to be quite honest, I cannot guarantee a good result from this kind of approach, since I have no empirical evidence. That is, although I’ve been in Washington 45 years, I’ve not seen unvarnished honesty ever risked in quite this way.

But I am guessing it could be quite disarming, and could send your debate partner scurrying for less effective talking points.

You will be debating a “fundamentalist,” but that is actually a misnomer. The fundamentals of Judeo-Christian morality have to do with truth-telling, justice and concern for the unprivileged.

Confessing, forgiving, and repenting are also fundamentals. Don’t be ashamed of them, Joe. Embrace them. My guess is that if you do, you will leave your debate partner shocked — if not speechless.

In the process, you will have succeeded in drawing a stark contrast between the “lies to nowhere” that she continues to tell on the one hand, and your (hopefully) terse, disarming honesty, on the other.

You will be free to go ahead and demonstrate that in John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, no presidential candidate in the history of this country has made a more irresponsible selection for a running mate.

And best of all, you will be able to sit back and smile next Sunday as you listen to the second Scripture reading (from Philippians 4):

“Whatever is true, honorable, and just…think about these and keep on doing them…Then the God who gives peace will be with you.”

Let Nathaniel be your model: no duplicity.

Sincerely,

Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Post Presidential Election Polls

The Post Debate Polls Posted by TOM BEVAN

http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2008/09/the_post_debate_polls.html

“Who won the debate polls” are notoriously subjective, of course, so take them for what they’re worth. But according to three post debate polls, respondents think Obama got the best of things tonight:

CBS News: Obama won 39%, McCain won 25%, Draw 36%

Insider Advantage: Obama won 42%, McCain won 41%, Undecided: 17%

CNN: Obama “did better” 51%, McCain “did better” 38%