After last night’s report at Talking Points Memo that the McCain campaign was involved in pushing the Ashley Todd story by claiming the B on the cheek stood for Barack, the McCain campaign is fighting back against those allegations, unsuccessfully.

Marc Ambinder has a post up that bullet points the Republican case for the Presidency. He caveats (probably to avoid mountains of hate mail) that some of it is far fetched, and that it’s simply the case McCain campaign officials are giving to donors and other VIPs. I thought it’d be fun to discuss each point on it’s own, briefly.

We’re going to hear a lot about national polls tightening, and with the first round of the weekly polls released today by CNN, showing Obama +5 (+8), they’ve got something to chew on. But as I made the point in the previous post, Obama isn’t losing support; McCain is just picking himself up off his floor. You can talk all you want about the national race tightening, but when you have Virginia +10 for Obama, it doesn’t really matter much.

New Rasmussen state polls just hit the ground. Here’s what we’ve got:

State

Obama

McCain

Margin

Virginia

54

44

+10

That’s right, Obama has moved up to +10 in Virginia, even with the national numbers tightening. Speaking of, CNN’s weekly poll is out today:

Obama

McCain

Margin

National

51

46

+5

The bad news, obviously, is McCain is picking up support. The good news is Obama simply isn’t losing support in these [...]

If you’ll recall, I wrote Monday about the psychological effects of negative ads, and how they may not make an immediate impact, but they have a latent effect on the viewer. I wanted to see how the week played out in the polls, and to see if they were working. There is talk of a Bradley effect in the electorate, so my question is, is there a Bradley effect for responding to questions about negative ads? All the polls said that for most people, the negative ads don’t work, but I don’t think that reflects how negative ads work. They aren’t supposed to turn you off the candidate immediately; they’re designed to make you associate negative feelings with a particular candidate. So, how are they doing?

Some good news from CNN on their polling of battleground states. Obama is tied or up in all of them, including my focal point, Florida.

It’s a story I’ve been waiting to gain some traction. It’s a more recent and direct connection between a candidate and an American Extremist, with video proof tying it all together, yet no one picked it up. Until now. Finally, Sarah Palin’s clear ties to the Alaska Independence Party, a separatist party in Alaska, founded by an anti-American extremist, with the stated goal of seccession from the Union, was picked up by CNN today.

Again, the negative campaigning will work, but it works best in a vacuum of other news. Right now, we’re seeing the bulk of tracking from before the debate; we have one day of post-debate reaction, and the rest is pure negative McCain. That’s going to show up in the polls. As a short term negative side-effect, McCain will continue to go with it, because it’s producing results where actual policy from him isn’t. But it’ll get him so far, and then he’ll have less time to convince people he’s the right choice.

What really irks me is that this sort of rubbish is what Drudge ends up putting on their homepage, when there’s much more exciting stuff out there. Anyways, maybe I failed journalism school, oh wait I didn’t even go, but isn’t it a little outlandish to try and say that CNN journalists—of all networks to [...]