This election will be a nail biter. I appreciate all of the diaries trying to downplay the importance of individual polls, but to ignore the signs is to ignore reality. Rasmussen, one of the three national pollsters that has proven worth more than a grain of salt this election cycle, has McCain pulling ahead today by one point for the first time in God knows how long. And this is consistent with recently released state polling. Obama's numbers have been dropping since July 4, and only briefly paused in their slippage after the trip abroad.
What I especially like about the Rasmussen numbers is that they represent a gauntlet tossed on the ground -- a challenge to you and me and everyone else who cares about this country. Rasmussen weights their polls using party data, meaning that they take the numbers of self-identified Republicans, Democrats and Independents from 2004, figure out how each group is voting today, and then calculate what the expected voting trend will be. Rasmussen uses this method to eliminate the enthusiasm gap, to compensate for the fact that Democrats, who are excited by our candidate, are more likely to sit through a robo-poll than are Republicans, who are only lukewarm on their candidate. And as I have already mentioned, Nate has already shown this to be a an at least somewhat merited method during the primaries.
So there it is. What is left to do? It's time to prove Rasmussen wrong, to break their model and methodology, which has shown to reap strong results in the past. And the only way we can do this, the only way that is possible, is to motivate our base -- all of our base -- to turn out during this election cycle. We have to turn our enthusiasm from being willing to sit through a robo-call into being willing to pick up the phone and make calls on behalf of our candidate; to get involved and make the change we are seeking. As McCain mocked Obama for saying in his most recent add, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." We are the ones who can make this happen.
So here's what I propose: It takes roughly a half hour to forty-five minutes to call through a list of thirty names on my.barackobama.com. That is less than what many people here spend on the site on a daily basis, I am guilty of much more. And as we all must readily admit, the DailyKos is great, it is friendly turf well in our comfort zone. But if we want to make the change we seek we are going to have to leave our comfort zone, over and over again. Or else this election is McCain's.
I've formed a group "Calling Before Kos," where we commit to making phone calls to one list of phone numbers, every day, before we log onto Kos. Here's the link on my.barackobama.com. Please click to join in bringing our voice outside of the echo chamber.
Lastly, I'd like to end this post with a metaphor. When I was a competitive distance runner we used to compare summer and winter mileage to saving pennies in an imaginary piggy bank. On each day that you went out and ran fifteen to twenty miles, at the end of the day you would have fifteen to twenty cents to store in your imaginary bank. And when the competitive season rolled around in spring or in fall, five or six months later, you had an entire jar filled to withdraw from. You hadn't just been saving for two months, you had a foundation to build upon. Even if you have a bad day, or a bad week, or were hobbled by an injury for an entire month, you had a base of preparation that couldn't be taken away.
I feel that this is how we must approach the election. Day by day. Week by week. Month by month, until the second Tuesday in November. And when that day hits, even if Obama is having a bad day week or month, if we have built the necessary foundation, we will be shedding tears of joy.
Rec this up if you feel so inclined.