Assuming that Republicans are more introverted, on average, than Democrats (due to their reluctance nationwide to participate in 2004 exit polling), Republicans would be the first to tune out of the final 2 weeks' deluge of polling. At this point, we would be pretty far down the Republican marginal response curve.
(y-axis = response rate; x-axis = frequency of polling, with high response rate at low frequency,
getting asymptotically low as frequency of polling (x) increases...sort of a y = e^(-x) ish function? Yeah, my math sucks--see the graph at the bottom for what I'm talking about). Democrats' marginal response curve would start, and commence its steep initial falloff, at some point far down the Republicans' marginal-decline-in-response curve. With the final deluge of polling, it's quite possible that Democrats are starting their steep marginal drop-off as well, especially with the sewage Republicans are pumping through the landline phone systems in battleground states (in the form of recorded attacks against Dem candidates). cf. FreeEats.com, our nation's biggest, baddest slinger of recorded, slanderous mud. (By the way, Republicans, this is an incredibly stupid strategy. You will be sacrificing a lot of brand eq in exchange for an election you shouldn't even want to win.)
At this point I look for events that could blunt Democratic momentum. I haven't seen any. There was the Saddam verdict, but do people actually care about that? He has been running his own courtroom circus for two years--why wasn't he hanged months, a year ago? Oh, right--more violence in Iraq. Bad for GOP polling?
The funny thing is, al-Maliki (PM of Iraq) is dependent on Moqtada al-Sadr for his power, and al-Sadr/Iran wants Bush to get trounced in November. I am surprised al-Sadr let the verdict be announced before the election.
[Update:] Here's a horrendously sloppy, impromptu, squiggly attempt to graph the effect I tried to illustrate in the first paragraph:
Yeah...I am still pretty new here, not sure how the whole upload-images thing works. If I may shamelessly pimp my blog again, you can find a graph there that better illustrates what I'm talking about.
http://the-ts-maven.blogspot.com/...
(cross-posted)