What Tennesseans will get will be a Jesus-loving, gun- supporting believer that families should come first, that taxes should be lower and America should be strong. ~Harold Ford, Jr.

Plus, he likes football and women–could he be a better match for Tennessee?  (Assuming, that is, that all of these claims are true, which is always a big if.)  I leave it to our Tennessean experts to have the final word on their home state’s Senate race, but except for the occasional small misstep Ford has run a remarkably effective campaign that taps into all the right themes where conservatives are dissatisfied with the GOP.  As of right now, Survey USA shows the Corker-Ford race exactly tied at 48.  Even should he lose, he has laid out a blueprint for how Democrats can poach conservative voters in at least the Upper South.  The trick is not a hard one to learn: actually campaign as if you took conservative issues seriously and, better yet, really take them seriously.   

I stick by my post-Foley prediction of a Democratic sweep in the seven close Senate races, and I will also stand by my prediction of a 10-seat Dem majority in the House.  The final tally in the House might be higher than that, but I don’t think so.  The “wave,” as Chuck Todd keeps calling it, will be a moderately large one but it will in all likelihood not be a cataclysmic tsunami-type wave that wins 40+ seats.   

The Senate sweep still seems like a long shot, but Talent and Allen are in real danger if they have not clearly closed the deal by this point.  Allen’s flailing, “Jim Webb writes dirty books” attack is the last gasp of the most pathetic campaign in a statewide race that I have ever seen, and if Virginians have any self-respect they will kick this preposterous Californian transplant to the curb.  (As a New Mexican, I have a particular dislike for the Californian transplant and all his works, as he very often tries to recreate the nightmarishly expensive and unpleasant place he just fled to the detriment of the people upon whose state he and his have descended like locusts.)  The monumental fraud who once fought against the integration of VMI (which he was right to do) now screams, “Remember Tailhook!” if it will help him smear his opponent, who for his part seems to be a generally decent man with fairly impeccable credentials as a veteran and former Reagan administration official.  Contempt is too good for such a dreadful jackanapes (if I were Allen, this would be where I pretend that I don’t know what jackanapes means and suggest that it has something to do with his haircut), but defeat would be satisfactory enough.  

Talent had nothing directly to do with it, so far as I know, but he pretty clearly comes out as the loser of the flare-up over the Fox ads because McCaskill has received enormous free advertising and may well win swing voters moved by Fox’s appeal.  That his appeal was manipulative and obnoxious in a certain sense will not change the fact that it is probably politically effective.  The anti-cloning ad that came out soon thereafter was effective, but it is likely that the Caviezel-Warner combo in particular was aimed primarily at evangelical voters in a desperate GOTV move to mobilise core opponents of the constitutional amendment (when he is not playing an overrated quarterback, Kurt Warner is a very serious evangelical).  Missouri is a classic bellwether state and will follow the national trend towards the Democrats.