| Morning Jolt – October 29, 2012 By Jim Geraghty Here's your Monday Morning Jolt. Enjoy! Jim Programming Notes: As long as Casa Geraghty in Yuppie Acres, Alexandria, Va., has electrical power and access to the Internet, the Jolt and Campaign Spot coverage will continue. During "El Derecho" -- Spanish for, "brief, intense thunderstorm that gets local Washington residents even more furious with their electrical providers than usual" -- we were spared while many in D.C. went without power for days and days. Coverage will continue on the regular schedule through Election Day. On Election Night, I will be joining Glenn Beck and the good folks at The Blaze down in Dallas, Texas, for live coverage. (On Election Night, I predict that whatever he's feeling that evening and into the wee hours of the morning, he's not going to be feeling it halfway.) There will be a Morning Jolt that Wednesday . . . and then I will be offline for a few days. (Note to self: Next lifetime, pick a marriage date that will keep your anniversary farther away from Election Day.) Technically I'm supposed to spend November 7 through 10 celebrating our anniversary and attending a friend's wedding; at this rate I will be definitely exhausted and either uncontrollably giddy or uncontrollably depressed for those days. The National Review cruise departs November 11, and the Jolt will be on hiatus that week, too. Sand-y in the Gears of Election 2012 Well, every bold prognosticator of this election cycle now has his excuse: "Everything in my projection/model was correct, but I couldn't account for the effect of a major hurricane hitting the Northeast a week before Election Day." You could see this turning out to be a minor factor; localities will have about a week to clear the roads, get the power back on, etc., and it probably should be largely fixed by November 6. But then again, you would have expected after the mess of the 2000 recount that Palm Beach County, Fla., would be extra careful to make sure it didn't have any printing errors in their official ballots. Whoops. Obviously, early voting is virtually suspended in all of the states experiencing hurricane-force winds, storm surges, etc. Depending on how bad the damage is, you could see some of the most casual, least-motivated voters not bothering to vote a week from Tuesday and focusing on repairing their houses. A few cycles ago, people used to joke that rainy weather was Republican weather; the Republican base was considered much more determined and reliable as voters than the Democrats' base. And certainly, this year polls have indicated that Republican enthusiasm is off the charts and Democrats' is down from the 2008 heights. (Apparently Obama's television ads are sufficiently outrageous to boost Republican enthusiasm to vote against him.) But I think the Democratic base turns out more regularly than it used to and is probably at parity with the Republican one. So if this lowers turnout a bit in states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Hampshire, my first guess would be that it's bad news for Obama. But right now Romney's on a wave. I'm far from a weather geek, but in my corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, Brendan Loy is touted as one of the most intense and sharp analysts of all things meteorological. (His Twitter feed is here, his web site is here.) I must say, reading his coverage of Sandy feels a bit like watching Jeff Goldblum playing a scientist in one of those something-goes-terribly-wrong movies, where he suddenly looks at a printout of data and begins excitedly and ominously rattling off a whole bunch of techno-babble -- "the barometric nano-neo-pressure is dropping to 950 mega-mips! This means the counter-circular wind-speed is accelerating as the warmer air rises and energizes the accumulated precipitation to unsustainable levels!" "God God, man, English! What does that mean?!?" (Whispering in shocked horror) "It's . . . the Storm of the Millennium!" The storm was a big topic on the Sunday shows, but this is one of those rare circumstances where strategists, consultants, talking heads, and lawmakers really don't have any clue as to how this will play out. On Sunday, politicos from both sides said it was still too early to tell how the storm would affect the race, but that access to voting centers would be a concern if effects from the storm persist until Election Day. "I don't think anybody really knows," top Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN's "State of the Union" about the potential political impact of Hurricane Sandy. "Obviously, we want unfettered access to the polls because we believe that the more people come out, the better we're going to do, and so to the extent that it makes it harder, you know, that's a source of concern. But I don't know how all the politics will sort out." Virginia's Republican governor said Sunday his state would take measures to ensure residents are able to vote, despite potential obstacles brought on by the storm. "We'll be ready, but we're planning for contingencies if there's still a problem," Bob McDonnell said on "State of the Union." He said his state would "absolutely" make polling centers such as schools and fire stations a top priority for restoring power should widespread outages occur. Another Virginian, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, predicted on Fox News the "storm will throw havoc into the race." We saw this in 2000 and for a few elections afterward; localities that were either poor or who simply underfunded their elections process had machines breaking down, too few polling places and so on, and then asked for extended voting hours. Of course, once you have polling places open in some places in a state but closed in other places . . . well, it seems like a formula for shenanigans. In the meantime, if you're in a low-lying area in the path of the storm, take a look at the National Weather Service in New Jersey offering some trademarked Garden State tact in this warning: 1. IF YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO EVACUATE A COASTAL LOCATION BY STATE AND LOCAL OFFICIALS, PLEASE DO SO. 2. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT TO EVACUATE, AND YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO RODE OUT THE `62 STORM ON THE BARRIER ISLANDS, ASK THEM IF THEY COULD DO IT AGAIN. 3. IF YOU ARE RELUCTANT, THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES, THINK ABOUT THE EMERGENCY RESPONDERS WHO WILL BE UNABLE TO REACH YOU WHEN YOU MAKE THE PANICKED PHONE CALL TO BE RESCUED, THINK ABOUT THE RESCUE/RECOVERY TEAMS WHO WILL RESCUE YOU IF YOU ARE INJURED OR RECOVER YOUR REMAINS IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE. Uff Da, I Can't Believe That Poll Result I don't really think Minnesota is in play. But if we start to see a series of polls, not just one, close enough to be within the margin of error, well . . . I think I hear the growl of the Preference Cascade creeping ever closer. The shock poll of the weekend: As the presidential race tightens across the country, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found that it is narrowing here as well, with President Obama holding a 3-point lead and Republican Mitt Romney making gains in the state. The poll shows Obama with support from 47 percent of likely voters and Romney earning backing from 44 percent -- a lead within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Last month, Obama had an 8-percentage point advantage in the Minnesota Poll. Romney has apparently cut into the Democrat's advantage among women since then and picked up support from Minnesotans who were previously undecided or said they would vote for a third-party candidate. Let's turn to a Minnesotan, Ed Morrissey, to see if it's reason to believe. I'd be the first to tell people that my state is a quadrennial sucker bet for Republicans. In 2008, no one thought we had a prayer, but in 2000 and 2004, Republicans actually thought they had a chance to break the Democrats' presidential winning streak, as the state last went to the GOP in 1972. I've been hearing Republicans get optimistic here again, but I've been highly skeptical of the prospects for Mitt Romney to even get close here. Until now: Snark aside, this looks like a relatively solid poll. The sample is D+5, with a D/R/I of 38/33/29. In 2008 when Obama won by 10 points, it was D+4 at 40/36/22, and I suspect that Republicans are going to be more motivated this time around. Obama wins the core counties in the Twin Cities, but only by a relatively weak 57/35. Romney wins the Metro suburbs with a majority 51/39 and edges Obama 46/44 in the rest of the state. In 2008, Obama had a 19-point edge in the gender gap, +3 among men and +16 among women. This time, Obama has only a +1 -- he's up 14 among women but down 13 among men. Obama still leads by 6 among independents, which he won by 17 points in 2008, but he's only got 43%. Late breakers are not likely to flow to the incumbent at this stage of the election; if they were inclined to support Obama, they'd already be in his corner now. That's true of the overall number as well. If Obama can only get to 47% in the Star Tribune poll with nine days left to go before the election in Minnesota, which has gone Democrat every presidential election over the last four years, this state is in play -- and that's why both campaigns are suddenly starting to spend money here. Finally, a bit of trivia: Minnesota's bird, and junior senator, is the Common Loon. Reviewing, and Thinking about, Hating Breitbart In case you missed it, this weekend I had a review on NRO of the new documentary Hating Breitbart. It is cathartic to be virtually in Andrew Breitbart's presence again for 85 minutes, and I have no doubt his fans will enjoy it. But I can't hide the fact that some decisions by the director -- primarily to release the film "as is," with his death only acknowledged in the final image -- threw me off a little. As I conclude: There's one more wrinkle that would have made a natural topic for the film's close and the discussion of Breitbart's legacy: the future of the institutions he founded. The wacky-cat-pictures-and-political-journalism site BuzzFeed recently did a story on the state of Breitbart.com, and large swaths of that article read like a hit piece, with lots of unnamed sources carping about their bosses. It's an unfortunate treatment of a legitimately fascinating story; the challenge before Solov, Bannon, Larry O'Connor, Dana Loesch, and the gang is a supremely difficult one. Their mission -- maintaining and building an institution so closely associated with the popular personality of its founder -- is difficult, probably the toughest of its sort since . . . well, perhaps since National Review needed to forge an identity without William F. Buckley Jr. But perhaps it's appropriate that Hating Breitbart ends too abruptly and leaves the viewer wanting more. That applies to the life of its subject, too. ADDENDUM: My brother assesses the Pittsburgh Steelers' throwback uniforms from this weekend: "Not only did the Steelers defeat the Washington Redskins today, they made some of the sweetest honey." There's a lot of buzz around that team. To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75% . . . Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for print-edition information. Click here for digital-edition information. And National Review makes a great gift. Click here to send a full-year gift to NR Digital, and here to send a full-year subscription to the print edition. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.nrcruise.com for complete information about our next trip. National Review, Inc. | 
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