"With the sand in the 2008 campaign hourglass about depleted, [Patrick] Campbell is part of a stubborn wedge of people who, somehow, are still making up their minds about who should be president. One in seven, or 14 percent, can't decide, or back a candidate but might switch, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll of likely voters released Friday."
     From an October 31 Associated Press story  

If you happen to have the time to keep track of events in real-time and can recall what happened during the waning months of the presidential primaries, I promise that you would come away with a dramatically different portrait of where the election is right now than the gloom-and-doom picture painted by the media.

Virtually everything you have read for the past couple of weeks and even more so the next few days is intended to depress the turnout for the pro-life team of John McCain and Sarah Palin. And every vote will count in what I predict will be a nail-biter next Tuesday.

Please read all seven points and pass this edition on to friends, family, and colleagues.

1. The single most important piece of breaking news came out yesterday when the Mason-Dixon poll put Obama ahead by a mere 4% in Pennsylvania. (Nine percent were undecided.) Mason-Dixon is among the most reliable pollsters. Just a couple of weeks ago, McCain was behind by double-digits. Carrying Pennsylvania could well be pivotal to the pro-life team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin. In my judgment, no two states have been more misunderstood/misrepresented than Pennsylvania and my state, Virginia.

2. Speaking of Virginia, it is closing for many of the same reasons the gap has shrunk dramatically in Pennsylvania. For starters, it never made sense that a genuine radical who is militantly pro-abortion should carry either state, and surely not by double-digit margins. Yesterday, National Review did a brilliant job of digging beneath the conventional wisdom that Obama benefits because of the many new voters who've registered in Virginia and because the proportion of voters from increasingly Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia has really grown.

It turns out that "Northern Virginia accounts for just a slightly larger share of the state's electorate [4 tens of one percent, to be exact] than it did four years ago," writes Brian Schaffner of pollster.com. And note that "in counties where Kerry won less than 40 percent of the vote--Bush country--an eye-opening 109,243 new voters have registered." Of course counties that went for Bush in 2004 could go for Obama in 2008, but this is sheer speculation.

Obama is supposedly ahead in Virginia because pollsters tell us that a share of people who voted for Bush last time around have said they prefer Obama this time, not because of the impact of the new registrants. But if there is anything that is clear the last two weeks it is that Republicans who were ambivalent about Sen. McCain are coming home in droves.

3. Watching McCain deliver a speech this morning, it is clear he is energized and (as they say) on message. And the crowds Palin is drawing are massive. When we look back, remember that she was/is attracting people in the very areas in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania that ought to GOP strongholds and need great turnouts. The bursts of enthusiasm that I have personally witnessed make it unmistakable: the tide has turned.

4. No doubt the turnout will be historic. But while the emphasis understandably has been on the increased turnout of African-Americans and voters 18-29, there will also be large increases in other demographics that are much more sympathetic to Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin.

5. There is movement among important swing groups in McCain's direction. According to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Corporation poll released a couple of days ago, "Independents back Obama by 5 percentage points today, down from a 9-point edge last week. Similarly, among white Catholics, Obama held an 11-point edge over McCain last week and today they split 46-46."

6. According to McCain's pollster, Bill McInturff, there is something like 8% of respondents who say they are undecided or refuse to tell the pollster what they think in the battleground states. Ordinarily these might well prove to be non-voters. But their self-expressed interest in this election is very high. Looking at Obama's fight with Sen. Hillary Clinton as a possible model, the undecided/refused to respond broke sharply for Clinton over the last two months of the Democrats' primary season. Writing in the Wall Street Journal McInturff argues they will do likewise for Sen. McCain, "add[ing] a net three plus points to our margins." And finally,

7. I won't waste your time by belaboring the obvious: the "mainstream media" is determined to elect pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama. One study after another from places like the Project for Excellence in Journalism document that while Obama and Sen. Joe Biden have received a sprinkling of negative media coverage, the pro-life team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin has endured a thunderstorm of negativity.

A friend of mine called me earlier this week to share that the Obama campaign (with its essentially unlimited sources of money) was spending millions sending out personalized DVDs to identified supporters. I'm told that when the person popped it into their player, the opening  was a mock headline that said Sen. McCain had won the election by one vote--the one this Obama supporter did NOT cast.

Make sure that everyone you know votes.