This is a quick reminder that the runoff election for U.S. Senate in Georgia will be on December 2, and there are many ways you can help Democrat Jim Martin beat Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss.

Depending on how the recount in Minnesota turns out, which won't be resolved for a few weeks, Martin could be the key to getting Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

1. Go donate to Martin's campaign. It will only take a minute of your time.

2. Help google-bomb Saxby Chambliss. This is easy, and Chris Bowers explains why it is helpful:

Have you started linking to Saxby Chambliss yet? The more people who do, the higher it will appear in search engine rankings. If we can push it into the first ten results for Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, then it will result in a lot of excellent voter contacts. Everyone who encounters the site will be a voter looking for more information on Saxby Chambliss, and we can show them this great website made by an enterprising activist.

Log on to the various blogs where you comment, and click on your user page. Then click "profile" (or at MyDD, "display"). There should be an area where you can write text that will be your "signature," attached to all comments you make.

You want to embed a link to the Saxby Chambliss website. Here is what I did:

See if Saxby Chambliss is helping you.

If you don't know how to embed a link, write this all on one line with no spaces between:

<

a href="http://saxby-chambliss.com/"

>

Saxby Chambliss

<

/a

>

3. Kick in a few more bucks to Martin's campaign.

4. If you live in Georgia or close enough to travel there, sign up to volunteer for Martin's campaign during the next few weeks. You were planning to take some time off for Thanksgiving anyway, right? Set aside extra time to volunteer.

Remember that there are many ways to volunteer besides knocking on strangers' doors and calling strangers on the phone. You can help sort literature for the canvassers. You can help stuff envelopes. You can bring a home-made meal to the campaign office for the staff and other volunteers. I heard of one woman in Iowa who used to do laundry for field organizers renting apartments without washing machines. Every hour that staffer doesn't have to spend in a laundromat is an hour he or she can be getting out the vote for Jim Martin.

5. Ask some friends or relatives to make a campaign contribution. Explain to them that this race will affect the Republicans' ability to obstruct the change we need.

Please feel free to suggest other ways activists can help Martin bring this race home.

people can make GOTV calls from other states into Georgia. President-Elect Obama can release his list of most active phone bankers and volunteers to the Martiin campaign, and Martin can feature a GOTV phonebank list on his site. Everyone is still revved up from November 4th, and we could easily flood Georgia with calls from many other states. We can only do this if Obama and Martin facilitate the calls through the Martin site, or if organizations like MyDD, DailyKos, or MoveOn step up to the plate to recruit callers and provide on-line voter lists.

Upthread comments are right about doing GOTV, and I'll be making calls. In the meantime, I'm also running this Google ad to assist in desmoinesdem's project No. 2: Hi from Saxby Chambliss Read about my work in D.C. Too bad it's not for you! saxby-chambliss.com It's getting monster response -- over 15 percent of people searching for "Saxby Chambliss" are clicking it. The bad thing about that is that my $10 a day budget gets used up pretty fast, so if you're of a mind to, go to Google and click on "Advertising Programs" and set up another ad.

We've had ten days to decompress from the election. It's time for a little self-promotion and self-criticism.

What did you predict accurately during the past campaign, and what did you get completely wrong?

The ground rules for this thread are as follows:

1. This is about your own forecasting skills. Do not post a comment solely to mock someone else's idiocy.

2. You are not allowed to boast about something you got right without owning up to at least one thing you got wrong.

3. For maximum bragging rights, include a link to a comment or diary containing your accurate prediction. Links are not required, though.

I'll get the ball rolling. Here are some of the more significant things I got wrong during the presidential campaign that just ended.

I thought that since John Edwards had been in the spotlight for years, the Republicans would probably not be able to spring an "October surprise" on us if he were the Democratic nominee. Oops.

In 2006 I thought Hillary's strong poll numbers among Democrats were

inflated by the fact that she has a lot of name recognition. I think once the campaign begins, her numbers will sink like Lieberman's did in 2003.

Then when her poll numbers held up in most states throughout 2007, I thought Hillary's coalition would collapse if she lost a few early primaries. Um, not quite.

I thought Barack Obama would fail to be viable in a lot of Iowa precincts dominated by voters over age 50.

I thought Obama had zero chance of beating John McCain in Florida.

Here are a few things I got right:

I consistently predicted that Hillary would finish no better than third in the Iowa caucuses. For that I was sometimes ridiculed in MyDD comment threads during the summer and fall of 2007.

I knew right away that choosing Sarah Palin was McCain's gift to Democrats on his own birthday, because it undercut his best argument against Obama: lack of experience.

I immediately sensed that letting the Obama campaign take over the GOTV effort in Iowa might lead to a convincing victory for Obama here without maximizing the gains for our down-ticket candidates. In fact, Iowa Democrats did lose a number of statehouse races we should have won last week.

By the way, if you are from Iowa or have Iowa connections, please consider helping the progressive community blog Bleeding Heartland analyze what went wrong and what went right for Democrats in some of the state House and Senate races.

This is my first post in a series on George W. Bush's gifts to corporate interests and major Republican donors during the final weeks of his presidency. (Please send me tips at desmoinesdem AT yahoo.com regarding other below-the-radar executive branch actions.)

This news came from the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's e-mail newsletter:

EPA Administrator Signs Off on Final CAFO Rule:  Last Friday, as a "Halloween trick" for the environment and public health, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson signed a revised Clean Water Act final regulation for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) permits and effluent limitations.  EPA revised the CAFO regulations in response to legal challenges to a 2003 CAFO final regulation, brought in the case Waterkeeper Alliance Inc. v. EPA by both environmental organizations and the CAFO sector.  

The revision opens a gaping hole in the 2003 regulation by allowing a CAFO, no matter how large, to self-certify that the CAFO does not "intend" to discharge to the waters of the U.S.   EPA ignored the recommendation of the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals to establish a regulatory presumption that large-scale CAFOs discharge pollutants.  The presumption would have required that a large-scale CAFO demonstrate to regulatory authorities that it is designed and can be operated to avoid all discharges of regulated pollutants.  

EPA also rejected making improvements in technology that reduce harmful bacteria and other pathogens that threaten public health, a problem aggravated by the development of antibiotic resistant pathogens in CAFOs.  The revised rule does include one improvement required in Waterkeeper -- that a CAFO nutrient management plan must be included in a Clean Water Act permit for the CAFO and made available for public review and comment.

EPA is expected publish the revised final regulation in the Federal Register before the end of November. In the meantime, a copy of the unofficial version of the revised regulation is posted on the EPA website. You can also register on the website for a November 19 EPA webcast about the revised CAFO regulation.

SAC will be urging the new Administration to revisit this rulemaking on an expedited basis.

Why am I not surprised that industrial ag profits are a higher priority than the environment and public health?

I hope that the Obama administration will put this on the list of actions to be overturned quickly.

If you care about food policy and sustainable agriculture, you should bookmark the community blog La Vida Locavore, featuring Jill Richardson (known to Daily Kos readers as OrangeClouds115) and Asinus Asinum Fricat, among others.

Jill's recent posts indicate that Obama will likely improve food safety and may move us in the right direction in several other agricultural policy areas.

I can't say I'll be very optimistic if Obama taps Tom Vilsack for secretary of agriculture. He did little to address pollution from conventional farming or to promote sustainable agriculture during his two terms as governor. The Organic Consumers Association doesn't hold back in this piece: Six Reasons Why Obama Appointing Monsanto's Buddy, Former Iowa Governor Vilsack, for USDA Head is a Terrible Idea.

A leading voice of Republican social conservatives in Iowa makes a surprising analogy in an op-ed piece from Tuesday's Des Moines Register:

Jesus Christ, whom many Republicans claim to follow, summoned his followers to be either hot or cold toward Him, because a "lukewarm" commitment makes Him want to vomit. I believe this accurately reflects the mood of voters in the past several elections where Republicans have witnessed consecutive defeats.

We have followed the misguided advice of "experts" to abandon our principles and move to the middle so we can supposedly win. In essence, we have become "lukewarm" on life, on marriage, on the Second Amendment, on limited government, on balanced budgets, on lower taxes, on parental rights in educating and raising children, on faith, on family and on freedom. The net result is that voters have spit us out of their mouths. [...]

The "elite" politicos and Iowa's dwindling Republican establishment are now convening committees and strategy sessions to advise their "flock" to abandon the party's principles and move even further to the middle if they hope to win again. The voter sees and tastes the "lukewarm" and compromising attempts to gain positions and power. The result is no trust, and the voter, like Christ, wants to throw up.

If Republicans are to win again, they must authentically embrace their core principles and effectively communicate a compelling message of bold-color conservatism that inspires faith, family and freedom.

That is no fringe politician talking. It's Bob Vander Plaats, a businessman from northwest Iowa who ran for the 2002 gubernatorial nomination, was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in 2006, and chaired Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign in Iowa.

If you click the link and read the whole piece by Vander Plaats, you won't find any opinion poll data backing up his assertions about why Iowa voters have been rejecting Republicans.

National polling shows that the electorate as a whole thinks Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections because they were too conservative. At the same time, Republicans are more likely to believe their party is losing because its candidates have not been conservative enough. I'm with Paul Rosenberg: all signs point to Republicans being ready to drive their party off a cliff.

I'll be honest: I'd love to see the Republican Party of Iowa embrace Vander Plaats' faith-based political strategy. I suspect that's a path toward further losses for the GOP in 2010. Republicans have already suffered net losses of seats in both the Iowa House and Iowa Senate for four straight elections.

Quite a few GOP legislative candidates who put social issues front and center in their campaigns lost statehouse elections in Iowa last Tuesday.

Vander Plaats does not name any specific candidates whose moderation allegedly made voters want to throw up. One who drew a lot of fire from the social conservative crowd was Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican challenger to Dave Loebsack in Iowa's second Congressional district. She was a strong candidate, in my opinion, and it would be ridiculous to argue that she lost for not being conservative enough. This district has a partisan index of D+7. No Republican in the whole country represents a Congressional district with that much of a Democratic lean. Mike Castle of Delaware is the only one who comes close, and he is not a religious conservative firebrand.

The Vander Plaats piece is further evidence of the deep split in the Republican Party of Iowa, which parallels the divisions at the national level recently discussed by Todd Beeton. It won't be easy to heal under any circumstances, but especially not if social conservatives insist on moving the party further to the right.

A conservative blogger I know started a meme examining the milestones of her life in relation to the presidential elections.

I picked up the meme, with a bit of a different focus (her blog is mostly about her Christian faith).

I posted an earlier version of this piece at Bleeding Heartland shortly after the third presidential debate. Now that the scale of Barack Obama's landslide is clear, who's up for a little scenario spinning on a slow Saturday morning?

Join me after the jump to consider whether Mitt Romney might have lost less badly on Tuesday.

Which candidates and interest groups did you hear from on the eve of the election?

On Monday afternoon at 1:40 pm I got a robocall urging me to "get the facts" before voting. The "facts" are that Jerry Sullivan (Democratic candidate in Iowa House district 59) supported the Project Destiny proposal, which Polk County voters resoundingly rejected in a July 2007 referendum.

I think the robocall erroneously claimed that Project Destiny would have raised my property taxes, when in fact it would have reduced property taxes while increasing the local sales tax.

The robocall went on to say that Sullivan is financially backed by groups wanting to pass some kind of legislation I couldn't hear, because my son was making a lot of noise in the background. It may have had something to do with unions or collective bargaining, because when I called Sullivan's campaign manager to tell him about the call, he said Republicans were lit-dropping a piece yesterday saying Jerry Sullivan will force you to join a union.

The robocall concluded by saying that the fact is we can't afford Jerry Sullivan, and that the call was "proudly paid for by Iowans for Tax Relief PAC, working to protect family budgets." I stayed on the line with my pen in hand, waiting to write down the phone number, but the robocall did not give a phone number. I thought that was required by law. The robocall did not mention Chris Hagenow, the Republican candidate in House district 59.

Sullivan's campaign had volunteers out in the most Republican part of the district yesterday (the wealthy Clive 4 precinct). They were dropping positive campaign literature, along with a piece about the nine mayors in the Des Moines metro area who have endorsed Sullivan, including Clive Mayor Les Aasheim.

I'm happy to report that the GOTV machine in Iowa is engaged on behalf of Democrats at all levels, as I mentioned in this post yesterday.

Who has contacted you lately about the election, and what did they say?

Barack Obama seems very likely to be elected president tomorrow, but he won't have coat-tails in all fifty states or all 435 Congressional districts. Some of our candidates will need a significant number of John McCain's voters to split their tickets in order to have any chance of winning.

In many parts of the country, however, down-ticket candidates will have the wind at their backs tomorrow. Obama not only leads the polls in their states, but also has a better ground game. I'm convinced that in these conditions, Democrats will win some shocking upsets.

Obama has had a double-digit lead in the Iowa polling average for a while now, but his lead seems to be growing as the election approaches. On Thursday Survey USA released an Iowa poll showing Obama ahead 55-40, with an even more commanding lead among respondents who said they'd already voted. On Sunday the Des Moines Register released Selzer and Associates' final Iowa poll of the season, which is even more gruesome for the GOP. Obama leads McCain 54-37 overall. Obama leads 3-1 among the 10 percent of respondents who said they'll be voting for the first time this year, and by 9 points among those who say they haven't voted since before 2000.

Also, the Des Moines Register found Obama supporters more optimistic going into the election:

Over three-quarters of [Obama's] supporters in Iowa say they are inspired and upbeat, with 15 percent describing themselves as angry and pessimistic.

McCain's supporters appear to be more troubled about the future, with 36 percent describing themselves as angry and pessimistic and 46 percent declaring themselves upbeat about the election.

Senator Tom Harkin leads his little-known and under-funded Republican challenger by 26 points in the same poll, giving those McCain supporters more reason to feel pessimistic.

The Des Moines Register's political columnist David Yepsen sees a landslide in the making:

For the first time in modern Iowa history, Democrats are poised to win control of both legislative chambers in two successive General Assemblies while at the same time holding the governorship.

Winning back-to-back Legislatures reflects a realignment of Iowa politics that could have far-reaching implications. For example, the state senators elected on Tuesday will be in office in 2011, when legislative and congressional district lines are redrawn for the next decade.

Yepsen gives Democrats the edge in many of the competitive Iowa House races, including several where the American Future Fund has been running tv ads. He didn't mention Iowa's two Congressional seats held by Republicans in his latest newspaper column, but in a separate blog post he noted that

Obama's lead in the poll is almost three times what his average lead is nationally.

So much for Iowa being a "battleground" or "tossup" state this time. [...]

Such poor numbers threaten to have a demoralizing effect among Republicans and an energizing one among Democrats. If Democrats smell victory and head to the polls while Republicans are in a funk and stay at home (as happened in the 1974 Watergate election), then Obama's landslide could bury other GOP candidates down the ballot.

What happened in 1974? Tom Harkin and Berkley Bedell, who had run unsuccessfully for Congress two years earlier, defeated Republican incumbents in western Iowa's conservative fifth and sixth Congressional districts.

Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny shares my view that Becky Greenwald (Democratic candidate in IA-04) and Rob Hubler (Democratic candidate in IA-05) could pull off upsets tomorrow. Both candidates are being outspent by Republican incumbents Tom Latham and Steve King, but they have been holding lots of campaign events around their districts and are running their own tv commercials. You can view Greenwald's final ad here and read the script here. Hubler's three tv ads are here (scroll down past the text of the Des Moines Register's endorsement editorial).

The GOTV machine in Iowa is engaged on behalf of Democrats at all levels. On Sunday I received a robocall from the Iowa Democratic Party, authorized by the Obama campaign for change, that mentioned voting for the "Democratic ticket" (not just Obama) twice. At the end it asked me to hold before giving me the name and address of my polling place. The same day, a volunteer left a door-hanger at our house, reminding us of the date of the election, the hours polls will be open, the phone number for Obama's toll-free early-voting hotline, our precinct number, the name and address of our polling location, and all the names on "your Democratic ticket" (in our case Obama, Harkin, Congressman Leonard Boswell, Democratic candidate Jerry Sullivan in Iowa House district 59, plus three Democrats seeking county offices).

MyDD readers, what are you seeing on the ground in your state? Where do you expect Obama to bring the most Democrats into office along with him?