NP: The Futureheads, This Is Not The World

One more reason for my newfound admiration of FiveThirtyEight.com is that they gets exactly how important the ground game is going to be, so contributor Sean Quinn is actually going out and investigating it.

Why is it so important? Here's the key point:

Pollsters have to guess about turnout, and often they revert to more conservative estimates because their past modeling of likely voters suggests that’s correct. Besides, if ground games are equally effective, they should cancel each other out. There's an understandable bias against believing something and modeling it until it is proven. It's why big enthusiasm and GOTV can make up ground against a fully accurate poll of voter preference.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan gets a first-hand account from one of those battleground states that dashes some of the Democratic doom-and-gloom. One anecdote does not an election make, so we'll see what Sean turns up.