U.S. Senate

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The SC race is most definitely not in the bag for DeMint and the race is tightening.  The most recent poll I've seen http://www.inez2004.com/portal/files/phatfile/SC%20poll%20memo.pdf
was taken September 7-9 and showed Bush with a 54-38 lead over Kerry but only a 46-40 lead for Demint with definite voters and 44-41 with likely voters.  The Bush numbers are in line with other polls, so I'm willing to accept that the Senate numbers are in the ballpark despite it being a poll released to the public by the  Inez campaign.  DeMint still has the lead, but this race is close enough that it can be won by Inez.  The so-called Fair Tax has hurt DeMint badly.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

If the election were held today I'd be content if either DeMint or Inez won as I think they would both make good Senators, but for different reasons.  This is unlike the Presidential contest where I will discontent no matter who wins as I have reasons to not be sanguine about either Bush or Kerry.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Tanenbaum was endorsed by EMILY's list, but favors the war with Iraq.  I don't have much hope there considering South Carolina has the lowest SAT scores in the nation and she's the education czaress.

Exactly.  Even without that, it would still be tough for her, but with that problem it makes it almost impossible.

SC has chonically had low SAT scores including under our previous Republican SoE, Nielsen.  There are a number of reasons for our poor performance on that measure, but our scores have been increasing for a number of years under both Inez and her predecesor.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The RSC has concluded that the SC race is close enough that it needs to spend close to $1 million that it hadn't planned to before into the state to help DeMint.  The State had an article on this in Saturday's paper.  Inez's campaign even claims to have polls showing her to be in the lead, but I haven't seen a publicly released one that does so.  The Fair Tax is killing DeMint.  He desperately needs to get the campaign shifted onto some other issue.  If not, then Inez will win this November.  Inez's recent ads on this issue are very clever as they quote a number of prominent Republicans who over the years have said that such schemes are goofy, thus helping to turn this into an Inez/DeMint race instead of an Dem/Rep race.