Republican tidal wave? Not so fast!

Has the party of WWW (wanking, witchcraft, Waffen-SS) actually teabagged away its chances of a Congressional landslide? Eighteen days before the election, here are the portents:

In the Senate, where every seat is critical, Republican primary voters in Delaware threw away a sure-fire win. O'Donnell is a joke, and I know of no serious assessment which gives her any real chance of victory. Nevada is now too close to call, but that in itself is telling; Reid is unpopular even with Democrats, and a moderate Republican is heavily favored for Governor. Teabaggerdom's nomination of Angle turned another Republican sure thing into a nail-biter. Connecticut, too, has been moving our way, perhaps due to McMahon's minimum-wage gaffe. Even FiveThirtyEight, which had lately been throwing cold water on Democratic hopes, has begun to take note of shifts in several states.

One Senate race clearly taking a turn for the worse is Florida, where Rubio has a widening lead. He's never reached 50%, and the race could still be salvaged if either Crist or Meek were to drop out in order to avoid splitting the liberal/centrist vote; given the ego and ambition of politicians, however, that's unlikely to happen.

In the contentious threesome up in Alaska, spurned pro-choice Republican Murkowski is within striking distance of teabagger Miller. If she wins, the outcome will be the same as if Miller had not been in the race -- except that some serious bad blood will have been created between her and the party.

Make no mistake -- every race counts. Even assuming that the Democrats retain their Senate majority, the margin matters. The more they perceive themselves as retaining a mandate, the better the odds that the timorous leadership will dredge up enough guts to change the Senate rules and abolish the filibuster for 2011.

As for the House, here are a few tight races to watch -- and, as with the Senate, the Republicans are plagued by a sprinkling of nutters such as Iott.

Another perennial problem for the right is hypocrisy. Whitman's campaign for Governor of California has been badly damaged by revelations about her illegal-alien housekeeper, despite attempts to downplay the issue.

There's also the issue of how accurate the polls are. Phone polls which exclude cell phones create a slight Republican bias (larger than in the past as one-fourth of US households now have no land line), and voting by mail creates other complications. Don't read too much into this; people who persuade themselves that polls they don't like are wrong usually end up getting smacked across the face by reality on election day. But with many races so close, even a couple of points' worth of bias could make a difference.

Make no mistake -- we are going to see some losses. The party holding power almost always does in mid-term elections. But the Republicans are salivating for a blow-out. Anything less will feel like a disappointment -- perhaps stinging enough to force the right into a long-overdue confrontation with the toxic extremists in its midst, while the Democrats retain enough power to get on with moving the country forward and cleaning up the awful messes left by the last period of right-wing rule.