www.kansascity.com

U.S. District Judge George C. Smith in Columbus ruled that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must perform verification required by the Help America Vote Act. That includes matching new registrants' information against information in databases maintained by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.

The order was the result of a lawsuit the Ohio Republican Party filed against Brunner, a Democrat.

...

Residents registering to vote must provide their name, address, date of birth and either their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

Apparently, Jennifer Brunner was quite happy with the concept that we take the voters word for it, thus opening the vote process wide open to fraud. This is of course in concert with ACORN's attempt to register people once, twice, three times, whatever. In 2004 Ohio SOS Ken Blackwell was accused of helping to steal the vote for the GOP. Now the Democratic SOS is helping in the other direction. Nice to know that some things never change.

"I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register," Barkley said. "They'd ask me if I was registered. I'd say yes, and they'd ask me to do it [register] again. Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it," he said.

Will Brunner and the ACORN registration attempts have an effect on the actual election? Only if it's close, and that's not likely. And if it's not close, the election is probably already over for McCain due to his losing in other states.

If it is close and OH is the swing state (again) yes, this is Florida 2000 all over again, but this time starring Jennifer Brunner as Katherine Harris.

As the presidential campaign winds its way down the home stretch, the electoral playing field that is emerging appears very similar to the final maps of the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. Sen. Barack Obama finds his campaign map shrinking, as states his campaign once boasted that it intended to compete in fall out of reach. Sen John McCain, on the other hand, finds himself on familiar Republican territory, a fact that while comforting, leaves his campaign far less room for error. Despite the attention lavished on the candidates, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and the intense focus on the campaign for more than 18 months, precious little electoral territory seems to have changed hands.

In 2000, George W. Bush was elected by the barest of margins in the Electoral College, 271-266, over incumbent Vice-President Al Gore. In 2004, Bush won reelection with 286 electoral votes, representing a switch of only three states from 2000 with electorally tiny New Hampshire going for Sen. John Kerry after voting for Bush in 2000, and New Mexico and Iowa each going for Bush after choosing Gore in 2000. This year, as in 2004, the candidates are finding that flipping states is easier said than done.

The Obama campaign believed that it could fundamentally change the electoral map, with Sen. Obama competing for and perhaps winning states that had not voted for a Democrat for president in a long time. States like Georgia and North Carolina, solid red states, were targeted by the campaign. But those states appear to have solidified for McCain, with the Real Clear Politics polling average showing an eight and twelve point lead respectively for McCain in each. Similarly in Virginia, once considered a prime Obama flip opportunity, the race has tilted toward McCain, who holds an average two point lead there with individual polls showing him up by as many as 9 points.

While McCain has been shoring up traditional strongholds, he has thus far not had much success in turning teetering blue states red. Pennsylvania and Michigan represent the best opportunities for McCain to take Electoral votes out of Obama's column. Obama performed very poorly in Pennsylvania during the primaries and didn't campaign in Michigan due to that state's disputed convention delegation. McCain would practically deliver a death-blow to the Obama campaign if he can swing one of the two his way. But here again, Real Clear Politics shows Obama clinging to leads in both, two points in Pennsylvania and about four in Michigan.

No, you read that title right. This one is weird even for Joe Biden. Not quite a gaffe, just way, way out there.

Political Punch

In an out-of-nowhere attempt to re-assure a southwestern Virginia labor crowd about gun owners' rights, Biden -- who regularly scores "F" ratings from the National Rifle Association -- warned Obama that if "he tries to fool with my Beretta, he's got a problem."

"I guarantee you Barack Obama ain't taking my shotguns, so don't buy that malarkey," Biden said Saturday at the United Mine Workers of America's annual fish fry in Castlewood, Virginia. "Don't buy that malarkey. They're going to start peddling that to you."

Biden told the crowd that he himself is a gun owner. "I got two," Biden said, "if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he's got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I'm not bad with it. So give me a break. Give me a break."

First reaction, when a politician starts saying "ain't" and words like "malarkey" that's a pretty good clue they're trying to be down with the little people. And warning Obama with a "cold, dead, fingers" warning... why, is Obama planning something we should know about.? This is just weird.

Biden has an F with the NRA on gun issues. Obama has similar issues. Sarah Palin is a lifelong member of the NRA. This issue doesn't have the greatest resonance, since the NRA largely feels safe from attack on these issues, but there are still pockets where it matters, and they are quite often in swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania... and Virginia.

The Herald-Dispatch

Republicans passed an unconstitutional law when they allowed Ohio counties to cancel a voter's registration solely because some election notices mailed to a home address come back undeliverable, the state Democratic elections chief said Friday.

Voters must be given a chance to respond ahead of the Nov. 4 election to avoid potentially disenfranchising them, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a directive issued to county boards of elections. The problem could be as simple as a typo on the home address or a mail delivery error, she said.

The interesting thing here is not the details of the procedure above, it's about the fact that this time around in 2008, we have a Democratic Secretary of State who has decided, apparently all by herself, that a state law is unconstitutional. If you don't think that's going to spark an outcry, think again. The correct procedure would have been to challenge the law in the court system first, but maybe that would have taken too long. Among her reasons was that going ahead would have triggered a lawsuit, as if ignoring a state law would not. Whatever.

Another irony is that four years ago, a Republican SOS, Ken Blackwell, raised a furor by adhering too closely to state law (by requiring 80 pound card stock on voter regs, among other things). This time it's not enough just to be relaxed about state law, the executive in charge can change it as she wants. Anyway, there will be a lawsuit about this, and likely with enough time for the county boards of elections to determine whether to purge some voter rolls if cards come back "not at this address". And even if voters get purged accidentally, they can vote provisionally and fix it later. Not exactly the Jim Crow era.

Will it make a difference? Only in a very, very close election (think Florida 2000, and let's hope it doesn't come to that). The thing to remember is that by law each county BOE in Ohio is controlled equally by two Democrats and two Republicans. Fraud and open bias is hard to do in Ohio in such a system, despite what you hear on the internets.

Yahoo! News

Obama has long looked for a way to win the White House without the 20 electoral votes of Ohio, the prototypical swing state. His top aides, including his campaign manager, once said they could lose the state and still win the election by picking off states that typically support Republicans.

...The campaign is quietly eyeing a states' map similar to the one used in past elections, with some exceptions. Obama this week dropped advertising in Georgia, a traditionally Republican state that he considered winnable based on increased voter registration among blacks and young people.

It looks like, just as in 2004, the key state will be Ohio. Historically that's not great news for Barack Obama. In 2000 Al Gore gave up early in Ohio and in 2004 Bush walked away with the state with a narrow but solid victory.

The good news for Obama is that since 2004, OH has swept in Democrats in almost all statewide offices, including Sherrod Brown as a senator over the hapless Mike DeWine. Ohio also has had a record setting Democratic primary resulting in a large registration of new Democratic voters.

The bad news is that most of these turned out to be Hillary supporters. Other bad news is that the northeastern portion of the state, a Democratic stronghold, has been bleeding population at an alarming rate, while the southeastern portion of the state is basically Appalachian and it's worthy to note that Obama is not a hit in Appalachia. But Obama can still win by maintaining a large gender gap among Ohio's suburban women around Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. Which is something that looked easy for him to do, until Palin shook things up a little. This is going to be interesting.

A couple of months ago, DHL announced it would be moving it's air freight business to UPS and mostly shuttering it's Wilmington facility. And since Wilmington is in Ohio, Ohio is a battleground state, and this is an election year, this has become a political football.

Here's Obama's attack:

And McCain's response:

Unfortunately the response message discipline has run amok at McCain HQ. And in this case the message (Obama is a tax raiser) has overridden any direct response that John McCain should have made to Obama's charges over DHL.

FactCheck.org does a much better job. And if McCain actually wants to, you know, kinda win this thing? He might want to run some response ads that actually respond.

Hat tip to RCP blog.

According to him, and this is Karl Rove, so I'd pay attention, we should be watching Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Colorado.

Other states will see serious competition, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, Missouri and Wisconsin. But Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and Ohio are likely to be the center of the action. To win, Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama's Electoral College math very difficult. And if Mr. McCain can limit GOP losses to one or two small states from those won by the GOP in 2004, he'll be America's 44th president.

He notes that in Ohio, among the keys will be suburban Cincinnati... hey, that's where I'm at! Hello ringside seat (again) along with the white blue collar areas in the northeast and southeast.

You would think that Florida would get more attention, but Karl Rove and recent polls show it as safely McCain and this column reflects the consensus that Florida will likely stay red. We'll watch how many times Obama goes there.

But the big takeaway here with these four is that McCain is defending three and Obama is defending one. It's Obama's race to lose, but it definitely can be lost, as Rove shows here.

Confirming the Upper Midwest strategy speculated on, McCain is buying ads mainly in OH, but throughout the Midwest, Hotline has the details:

-- For the week of 7/15-7/21, McCain's team spent the most money in OH ($805,978), MI ($601,439.71), MO ($471,967.56) and PA ($470,113.43). The GOPer also bought airtime in CO ($395,254.28), WI ($368,645.14), NV ($257,635.71) and IA ($237,166.57), and, in smaller amounts in NH, ND, OR and NM .

-- OH again leads the pack for the week of 7/22-7/28, with the McCain camp investing ($489,836.72) in the critical battleground state. Other state buys for the last full week in July: MO ($299,196.43), MI ($290,889.28), WI ($259,630.72), CO ($253,495.72) and PA ($239,797.14).

Supplementing these numbers is a prominent Washington Post story about the McCain's movement in these states:

McCain and Obama are in a statistical dead heat in Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota while the Illinois senator has a more comfortable double-digit edge in Wisconsin, according to polling conducted by Quinnipiac University for washingtonpost.com and the Wall Street Journal during the past week. Only in Colorado, however, does McCain hold a greater percentage of the vote share than Obama.

The economy is still the dominant concern of voters in each state. Nearly six in ten respondents in Michigan, a state crippled by the dire problems of the auto industry, cited the economy as the single most important issue in their decision this fall. The war in Iraq ranked second in terms of voter priorities but was named by less than one in five respondents in each state. Potential hot button issues such as terrorism and illegal immigration were cited by fewer than 10 percent of voters in ranking their top priorities.

It's all about the economy, all the time in these states. Iraq is off the table, immigration is off the table, terrorism is off the table. You'd think this would be good for Obama, but in Michigan they are six years into a Democratic governorship with no end in sight of economic hard times. If anything the high energy spikes are compounding the problem by driving a stake into the heart of whats left of the auto industry there.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the election will go to the candidate who has the best credible plan for fixing energy prices and the economy.

First Michigan:

A new Detroit News-WXYZ-EPIC-MRA poll has Obama leading by two points in Michigan, 43%-41%. "The numbers are an improvement for Obama over EPIC-MRA's last survey, in late May, which found McCain leading by 4 points. It's also a better showing for McCain than in other recent polls: Real Clear Politics, a Website that tracks and averages political polls, shows Obama with a 7.7-point lead in its Michigan polling average."

Then Ohio:

John McCain has opened a modest lead over Barack Obama in the key swing state of Ohio. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the Buckeye State shows McCain attracting 46% of the vote while Obama earns 40%. Last month and the month before McCain held a insignificant one-point lead over Obama.

So Michigan is essentially tied and Ohio has McCain up? This would more than make up for Obama's lead in swinging Colorado.

McCain won an unexpected primary in 2000 without the help of the MI GOP establishment, in the 2008 primary he lost to Michigan native son Mitt Romney, but did get 30%. So he's stronger in Michigan than you would expect the average Republican. Also Michigan has suffered through economic hard times for about the last four years, and just now the rest of the country is catching up. Michigan has also had a Democratic governor for all of this time. They just might be ready to vote for a Republican. Obama will do well in Detroit and the Urban areas, so McCain will have to run the table everywhere else. But the poll indicates that it's doable.

It also validates a McCain upper midwest strategy of targeting the states from Minneapolis to Pennsylvania, with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio in between. Except for Ohio, all of these went to Kerry in 2004. Even picking off three out of the five will make it tough for Obama to make up elsewhere. It doesn't hurt that in these states the cost of heating oil is a very big deal.

McCain did a townhall meeting in Portsmouth, which is at the very southern tip of Ohio on the river, and because I live here, I can give hopefully a little insight to the political happenings of the day.

...

McCain focused on his campaign's economic message of the week, first reading prepared remarks from an inconspicuous podium that stood barely waist-high on the stage. Senior McCain advisor Mark Salter paced at one end of the gymnasium as he watched McCain's delivery, which has been under renewed focus after of his struggles to read from a teleprompter and criticism that his campaign lacks a disciplined, day-to-day message.

The 1,200-strong event was bigger, louder and more supportive of McCain than his previous town hall meeting with undecided voters in Cincinnati.

I take this to mean that the team is getting better at these things and that McCain is getting some serious coaching on his delivery. This is not abnormal and by the time the fall comes around most presidential candidates are very good with the stump speeches. Unless they're a natural like Mike Huckabee, coaching always helps.

But the interesting part came earlier when the Democratic Ohio Governor Ted Strickland came down to do a counter rally:

Strickland spoke to a crowd of about 150 Democrats at the union hall across the street from Portsmouth High School, where presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain spoke later that day.

"When it comes to the policies of George Bush, the candidate across the street is John McSame," Governor Ted Strickland told the local media after the event.

150 people is worse than it sounds, even comparing a governor to a presidential candidate. This is Ted Stricklands old congressional district stomping grounds and 150 people is somewhat of an embarrassment, if it was even that. I have an email that says it was 25 and garnered next to no excitement as everyone focused on McCain.

But I understand the motivation of getting Strickland, or any surrogate down there, this is the area where Hillary spanked Obama with 75% plus voting margins in the general primary. With the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown depopulating, Obama needs to make up somewhere else to win Ohio. Rural areas like this could be the tie breaker.

Strickland won the governorship for the Democrats by doing well in areas like this and holding ground in the conservative areas. Obviously Obama is hoping he can do the same for a presidential candidate.