Via Roll Call:

A collection of 15 Republicans — all former Members of Congress, governors or Environmental Protection Agency administrators — called on the president Wednesday to set aggressive auto emission and fuel efficiency standards beginning in 2017.

“I’m just very passionate about the environment,” said former Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), who spearheaded the letter to President Barack Obama. “We want the administration to know there are serious-minded Republicans who are well informed on the issue who urge him to take aggressive action.”

Other former House Members who signed the letter were Michael Castle (Del.), who is now a partner with the lobbying and law firm DLA Piper; Vernon Ehlers (Mich.); Wayne Gilchrest (Md.); Benjamin Gilman (N.Y.); Amory Houghton (N.Y.); Connie Morella (Md.); Chris Shays (Conn.); Jim Ramstad (Minn.); and Peter Smith (Vt.). Former EPA Administrators Christine Whitman, Russell Train, Bill Reilly and Bill Ruckelshaus also signed the letter, as did Jim Douglas, a former governor of Vermont.

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In their letter, the Republicans wrote that annual increases of about 6 percent through the year 2025 would be acceptable.

What does that 6 percent number equate to in real terms?

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Scott Rasmussen now predicts that the Republicans will pick up fifty-five seats in the House. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia still has the pick-up at forty-seven but says that, if forced to tweak the numbers right now, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits – which is to say, he agrees with Rasmussen.

There are pollsters out there who are playing games, as a glance at the polls for the Senate race in West Virginia should make clear – and, of course, it is easy to play games. If one wants to encourage the Left and discourage potential Republican voters and donors, all that one has to do is to base one’s poll on the presumption that the percentage of self-described Democrats within the voting public in 2010 will be equal to the percentage in 2008.

Sabato and his associates and Rasmussen are not, however, among the gamesters. Both are aiming at accuracy. Sabato and company have a reputation to uphold (and, in the academic world, that is all-important), and Rasmussen is a nonpartisan pollster who attracts clients by way of demonstrated precision. Neither outfit can afford to make a fool of itself.

I nonetheless think that both are greatly underestimating the size of the Republican surge. Both have reason to be cautious. For understandable reasons, neither is going to climb out on a limb; and both are basing their estimates on recent electoral history. If something is in the offing that exceeds the range of political oscillation in recent decades (including, notably, 1994), if we in American live in something other than normal times, they will miss the size of the surge.

It is good to remember that not a single Sovietologist predicted the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet regime. History has a way of lulling us into sleep. What has been in recent times we tend to think will be in the foreseeable future. Then, every once in a while, suddenly, out of nowhere, a political earthquake arrives – and only in the aftermath do the experts notice that there were ample warning signs.

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Just outside the DC Beltway, in Maryland’s sprawling first congressional district, an electoral battle is underway that exposes unique ideological fault lines beneath America’s political landscape.

The campaign pits freshman “Blue Dog” Democratic congressman Frank Kratovil in a rematch against Republican Dr. Andy Harris. Given the political tilt of the district, coupled with the Tea Party tsunami gathering force this year, one would think that this race should be a slam dunk for Harris.

A tall, affable family man, Harris is an anesthesiologist, Navy veteran, hardcore free-marketer, and constitutional conservative. By contrast, Kratovil, a former attorney, tries to portray himself as an “independent” who distances himself from Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic majority. However, the Washington Post reports that “Frank Kratovil has voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues 84.6% of the time during the current Congress.” Among his least popular votes since taking office: support for the “cash for clunkers” program, for the near-trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending orgy, and for the hugely expensive “cap-and-trade” energy bill. Plus, of course, his vote to elevate the widely reviled Pelosi to the Speaker’s position.

Yet, despite all that, a recent poll finds Harris holding only a statistically insignificant three-point lead over Kratovil. This, while other GOP candidates are faring much better even in usually “safe” Democratic districts.

What’s going on here?

One of the most infuriating spectacles this election season is supposedly “Republican,” “conservative,” and “pro-business” individuals and groups supporting entrenched liberal incumbents against free-market, limited-government challengers. For many special-interest “insiders,” even on the right, philosophical convictions are far less important than sharing a “seat at the table” with the politically powerful.

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A lot has been written on this site and elsewhere concerning the Pledge to America that the Republicans unveiled on Friday. For the most part, bloggers have been critical. Some have argued that it will not do the Republicans any good in November. Others dismiss it as milquetoast. Emily Esfahani Smith has done a good job collecting the comments.

I think the critics are wrong, quite wrong – and for two reasons. First, those who drafted the Pledge took great care to ground everything that they had to say in first principles. They drew the attention of the nation to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. Then, they pointed to our departure from these principles in recent years, asserting that the Democrats bear prime responsibility for this, but acknowledging Republican failures as well.

And, finally, they spelled out the corrective measures that are most pressing – a repeal of Obamacare (not a collection of minor adjustments); a reduction of federal expenditures (apart from those devoted to national defense) back to the level of 2008; and an extension of the tax cuts introduced by George W. Bush.

Should they have gone further? Perhaps, perhaps not. This is a document devised for three purposes. It is aimed at winning an election, at preparing a party now in opposition for legislative hegemony, and at initiating an enduring partisan realignment. In such circumstances, two things are necessary. A simple straightforward set of principles needs to be announced, and the most pressing concerns need to be directly addressed.

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Can we trust the current polls? I do not mean to level any accusations. I think that, with rare exceptions, the pollsters are doing their best to assess the trends. If nothing else, they know that accuracy pays off – that a pollster who gets things right will get a lot of business down the road.

What I have in mind is something else. I suspect that there is something afoot which the pollsters do not yet know how to measure. There is evidence that seems to me to be dispositive. No one predicted Joe Miller’s victory in the Alaska primary; no one predicted Christine O’Donnell’s defeat of Mike Castle – and let’s face it: in neither case was the margin of victory small. My bet is that in November the Republicans will take every single race – for the House, the Senate, or at the state level – in which the pollsters (including Rasmussen, the best of the lot) report that the race is even remotely close.

On 2 September, I posted a piece suggesting that the Republicans would pick up more than 70 seats in the House and would take the Senate. I now think that they will do even better than this – at least in the House. As Peter Wehner and Paul Mirengoff have noted, when Glenn Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies ran a survey recently for the American Action Network, he made a discovery of great interest:

The generic ballot shows Republicans leading 44%-39%. Besides all of the usual regional crosstabs, we also broke it out by the type of district. We looked at the sample in the 66 Democratic INCUMBENT districts that Charlie Cook lists as either toss-up or leaning Democratic at the time of the survey. In that key crosstab of Swing Democratic Incumbent Seats, the Republican lead grows to 49%-31% on the generic ballot. That is a very powerful crosstab that says the wave is coming.

Among the remaining Democratic districts (Likely/Safe Dem, and open seats), the generic ballot is an unsurprisingly 33% GOP/51% Dem — a sign that the historically safe Dem seat will remain so, while the swing seats will be a bloodbath. By the way, in all of  the GOP held seats, the generic is the reverse of the base Dem seats — 52% GOP/32% Dem. Very few, if any, Republican incumbents will be defeated.

Likewise, President Obama’s numbers with likely voters are similar to the national average — 46% approve/51% disapprove. However, in the Swing Democratic Incumbent Seats. he has a much worse 40% approve/57% disapprove. (Keep in mind, many of these Swing Seats are held by Democrats despite the fact that John McCain either won the district in 2008, or, even if losing, outperformed his national result.

On 2 November, there is going to be an electoral revolution. I doubt that it will exceed the shift which took place in 1894 – when, in the wake of the Panic of 1893, Grover Cleveland’s Democratic Party split between its goldbug Bourbon wing and the populists who would later unite behind William Jennings Bryan and, in the midterm elections held that year, the Democrats lost 125 seats and the Republicans had a pickup of 130. But it may exceed the largest shift in the 20^th century, when 101 seats changed hands in 1932.

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From the UK’s Telegraph (where we often go to find stories not covered by our lame media):

First they were ignored. Then they were derided as the tools of Big Money. Then they were branded as racists, the unhinged, the unwashed, the paranoid, the subversive and the ignorant – or some combination thereof.

Now, they stand accused of aiding and abetting the enemy by splitting the Republican party and giving Democrats hope for the November mid-terms. It has been a rough ride for members of the Tea Party in the 19 months since their movement sprung up.

But each insult and attempt to marginalise them seems only to have stiffened their resolve and swelled their numbers. Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members.

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John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, offers his thoughts on the GOP spat over Christine O’Donnell’s victory in Delaware. It’s a refreshing read.

Tuesday night, I happened to be watching live when Karl Rove fulminated on the Christine O’Donnell win in the Delaware GOP Senate primary.  You can see the full video here but I’ve provided a transcript (from Fox News) of some of the key passages below.  Among the things Rove said:

• “This is the inexplicable (emphasis added) one because Christine O’Donnell has come on here at the — very end of the campaign. There’s a huge turnout tonight in Delaware. The total was estimated to be 30,000 people going into the primary and has come out 56,000. She has dealt a defeat to one of the state’s longest, best-known, thought to be most-beloved political figures, a former governor and nine-term Republican Congressman in Mike Castle.”
• “One thing that Christine O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election that she didn’t have to answer in the primary is her own checkered background….I’ve met her. I got to tell you, I wasn’t frankly impressed as her abilities as a candidate.”
• “And again, these serious questions about how does she make her living? Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took nearly two decades to pay her college bills so she could get her college degree? How did she make a living? Why did she sue a well-known and well thought of conservative think tank?”

Here’s what Rove should have said:

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Tea Party conservative Christine O’Donnell knocked off longtime Republican insider milquetoast Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican primary Tuesday for the Senate seat once held in a lockbox by Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s another victory for the GOP rank and file, whose party leadership has abandoned them in recent years on its great detour into the wilderness of big-government leftism.

One of the lessons that leaped out at me in recent days, as O’Donnell stormed from out of nowhere to win, was the symbolic difference in the two candidates:

O’Donnell: pretty, young (41), wide-eyed, smiling and bright, marching off confidently from appearance to appearance with a strong conservative message. The very image of the girl next door.

Castle: old (71), weathered, worn, dour and gray, walking lamely and slowly. The very image of the tired old white-guy GOP that has turned off young voters at least since the days of Reagan, and maybe longer, pitching leftist policies from his RINO perch.

GOP leadership wants to cling to its tired, old, go-along-to-get-along image. The GOP rank and file, in primary after primary, is very clear in what it wants: young, new, vibrant, and conservative! They don’t want to go along to get along with big-government statism. They want to fight. They want to take back their country.

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame duck session.  Thus Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on election day will—barring a disputed election result—be seated for a lame duck session in December.  A fourth, Colorado, is less clear but may also be in play.

The lame duck session looks increasingly likely—and increasingly ambitious.  Sen. Kerry continues to stress that cap-and-trade will be on the agenda, and Sen. Harry Reid (who may be a lame duck himself after Election Day) confirmed it to the Netroots Nation audience, saying: “We’re going to have to have a lame-duck session, so we’re not giving up.”

Along with cap-and-trade, a lame duck will likely consider the recommendations of Obama’s deficit commission — a package that will include enormous tax hikes and could draw the support of some departing Republicans like Judd Gregg of New Hampshire George Voinovich of Ohio, and Robert Bennett of Utah.

And organized labor, seeing the lame duck as their last chance for a legislative return on their political investments for years, will also demand lame duck action.

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