Politics and other nightmares

Now we know there might be some truth to what people have suspected for years about the weather and elections:

A new study of voter behavior confirms something political operatives have long suspected: rain hurts Democrats and helps Republicans. The study found that 1 inch of rain reduces overall turnout by slightly less than 1 percent and cuts the Democratic vote by 2.5 percentage points.

Suppose Steve Shine is looking out his window right now and thinking, "There IS a God, and he's Republican"?

On the other hand:

I've seen a lot of articles like this one in Newsweek trying to explain and/or predict the election. This particular one mentions stem cells, gay marriage, the right to die and abortion as "sleeper" issues that might be big factors. It doesn't mention illegal immigration, and most of the other analyses are strangely silent on the subject as well.

This article tries to fathom why so few Americans vote. It finally gets around to saying that the nonvoters just aren't "connected."

Most broadly, the poll found that nonvoters are not just disconnected from politics, but also from their communities. Nonvoters were less likely to trust others, to have a strong support network of friends and family or to know their neighbors than regular voters were.

Here's some really good number-crunching from the Lafayette Jouranl & Courier on how much Indiana's congressional races have contributed to local economies:

Russ Pulliam of the Indianapolis Star does a profile of Mark Souder under the headline "Incumbent doesn't walk the party line."

The Christian Science Monitor focuses on Indiana's 2nd Congressional District in a piece explaining that, the voters' displeasure with Iraq notwithstanding, "the economy" is still a powerful force in the upcoming election:

Great news for northeast Indiana. It looks like Fort Wayne's David Long is going to be the next president pro tem of the state Senate:

Is there really any doubt what John Kerry thinks about the military?

Kerry then told the students that if they were able to navigate the education system, they could get comfortable jobs - "If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq," he said to a mixture of laughter and gasps.

In my last vacation post from Texas on Friday, I lamented the left-right camps we let ourselves get pushed into during campaign season, an exercise in political extremism that is at odds with the way I think most of us live our lives, which is to assess each issue as it comes, making the best decision we can based on the available evidence.

Everyone has been focusing on the three Indiana Republican congressmen who might lose their races, but one of the Democrats is in trouble, too: