Roots

An outtake from Senator Obama's speech in Elko yesterday.

Take it to heart.

"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face."

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Here are some good polling numbers out recently:

• CBS/NY Times National (9/12-9/16) (9/8 results in parentheses):

Obama 48 (44)
McCain 43 (46

• Quinnipiac National (9/11-9/16):

Obama 49
McCain 45

• Obama's up in Indiana, 47-44.

• Merkley (D) has closed the gap in OR-Senate: (8/7 in parens)
  

Smith 46 (47)
Merkley 45 (39)

And OpenLeft agrees with the DCW Presidential Forecast:

Colorado is the tipping point.

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Obama maintains the slimmest of leads, 270-268, an decrease of a 11 EVs from our last forecast. Bottom line, the state polls are still showing McCain's convention bounce, even as the national polls are starting to go Obama's way. We used to abuse our slow moving projections, FHQ, CNN, NBC and Rasmussen - now we love them. It's the sensitive projections, led by our friendly left blogs OpenLeft and 538, that give McCain his best numbers.

Colorado remains our tipping point state.

Map changes: Towards McCain: FL: T-> ML; NC, NC and SD, ML->M

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Welcome to NewsWatch
Welcome to a new daily segment on DemConWatch. My name is Gabe Stein, and I spend most of my free time reading articles about the election - a lot of articles. I recently started calculating the number, and it's scary: I generally go through 50 to 100 articles per day. Yeah, I'm a total junkie, but in order to put the obsession to good use, I decided to volunteer to contribute to DemConWatch for the next seven weeks.

What you'll see from me is a daily dose of the top campaign stories from each news cycle, culled from hundreds of sources. While I can't promise to never miss a story, I'll try not to miss many, and more importantly, I'll intelligently synthesize the information by working to identify emerging common narratives in the otherwise unconnected mass of material. There's a theory that if you flood your mind with enough information, you're able to step back from the fray and find bigger trends you would have otherwise missed. Let's see if that works.

Of course, I invite you to provide your own analysis and point out anything I may have missed. So without further adieu:

Trends and Tremors

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The beginning of the end of Joe Lieberman as even a pretense of a shadow of a Democrat. And yes, it happened last week, and I missed it. But better late than never.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided that Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) — one of Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) top supporters — can no longer attend Democrats’ weekly caucus lunches or the biweekly chairmen’s lunches used to formulate policy, senior Democratic aides said Tuesday.

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