Rebound

Hm, interesting:

Florida Democrat Alex Sink leads Republican Rick Scott in the race for governor of the fourth- most-populous U.S. state for the first time in a Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters.

Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, was supported by 45 percent of respondents to 41 percent for Scott, a former health-care executive, in the survey taken Oct. 18-24, the Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said today. The poll of 784 people has an error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Why interesting? Two reasons.

First, Sink had been lagging behind in the polls since, well, since the race shaped up during the primaries way back in the spring. Indeed, as late as October 1, she lagged six points behind Scott, who has Teabagger support (which is weird because he was founder of Columbia Healthcare, which went on to become the largest private healthcare provider in America...you'd hardly think of him as rabble).

Second, Scott has spent enormous sums of money (here's a trivia bit for you: Between Scott, Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman, a quarter of a billion...billion with a "b"...has been spent. All three are now losing their races).

All summer and fall, we'd heard about the massacre the Republicans would pull off in November at the polls. It seems that was premature talk, which summer boasting usually is. People don't pay attention to the races until September, until after Labor Day, when our attention span snaps into place.

And of course, as Christine O'Donnel, Rand Paul, and Carl Paladino prove, in the emotion of battle, "warriors" become stupid. The Teabaggers believed anger would put them over the top, but as many smarter people than I will point out, you can only fool some of the people all of the time, and the fools are still fooled. The rest of us woke up.

Perhaps none too late. We'll see come Tuesday.

One side note: the parallels between Ronald Reagan's first term and President Obama's first term are remarkable. Reagan's polling at this moment in his first term (just before midterms) was worse than Obama's. Reagan lost 26 seats in the 1982 election. If this election is a mandate on Obama's first two years, he'll have to come in under that number for this election to be deemed a success.

It appears he just might do that.