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Behind the scenes of the most powerful city in the world — Washington, D.C. — and those who cover it.

Your Guide To Election Day at The Mid-Way

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It’s Election Day and we’ve got nine hours until the polls close for 2010–now we just have 734 days until the next election, and you can be sure that’ll be on the minds of every pundit as of 12:01 am Wednesday morning.

If you’re planning on watching the day’s coverage, TheWrap highlights every major network’s planned schedules–including the overtly confusing ABC/Breitbart kerfuffle.  Don’t want to wait? Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight claims a 54-55 seat gain in the House by GOP from yesterday–the GOP only need 39 to take control. But as Andrea Mitchell said today during an interview with Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss), it’s still a 34 percent pro-GOP vote and appears to be a “firing” election rather than “hiring.”

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Scandal and Triage Define The Election

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The true theme of the 2010 mid-term elections is clear: panic? No, it’s anger! Wait, no. Oh, right. It’s all about confusing the message.

Whether it’s been increasingly bizarre defense and attack ads courtesy of Delaware’s Christine “I’m Not A Witch” O’Donnell (rightfully parodied by SNL here) or Chris Coons going the “No Comment” route as the New York Times reports. Ignoring the “Mama Grizzly” trope that Newsweek tried to explain, the message behind the Delaware Senate race is tough to understand.

For the Times, Frank Bruni breaks it down as “She: cheerleader pretty. He: science-club-president plain.” This can be applied to roughly 90 percent of politics with ten percent leftover for ads and scandal.

Politico runs the idea that both parties are hemorrhaging members and sacrificial lambs to the media slaughter:

All of it is part of Washington’s biennial exercise in cold-blooded, risk-reward analysis: Figuring out which candidates to fund in the homestretch and which ones to cut loose. It’s the Beltway equivalent of choosing which of your children to put in the lifeboat, as the party committees decide which candidates to throw overboard because they aren’t viable enough to warrant the investment.
Which is also highly accurate when most newscycles become dominated by the spectacular pony shows that an on-camera interview with Alvin Greene can generate. Even better?
Beware a Republican Congress or else Obama will be impeached–sez Jonathan Chait in The New Republic complete with ominous subhed “The coming impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama.” This isn’t actually happening now, but it could! And so could a complete Dem sweep on November 2nd and so could a cloudy day in June.
This election year has been rife with over-analyzation to the point that it’s even grating for regular policy wonks trying to juggle whether or not a “viral” ad will help or hinder a candidate’s message.