The tightening face

As seen by the Russian media: Дженнифер Рубин.

Great news from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post: She thinks hack Ed Gillespie is likely to pull an upset over Mark Warner in the Virginia Senate race (echoing yesterday's "exclusive report" by Alex Pappas at the Daily Squalor and this morning's breakfast for Dr. William Kristol, the only pandit in history of a wrongness so pervasive as to get him sacked from the New York Times, a feat not even David Brooks has been able to accomplish). So I think we can take it as a given that Warner is safe.

Two late polls showing the gap in what was nearly a 30-point race shrinking to single digits has lifted Republicans’ spirits in Virginia.

Has they indeed, then?

In a GOP robo poll by Vox Populi, Sen. Mark Warner (D) leads GOP nominee Ed Gillespie by four points, but the percentage of undecideds (11) is suspiciously high.

Also, of course, 538 doesn't think so highly of robo poll accuracy, noting that their inability to access cell phones builds in an underestimation of the youth and hence Democratic vote. And the undecided percentage is "suspicious"? What precisely do you suspect, Holmes? "I particularly wanted to cite this poll because I have reason to believe it may be inaccurate." (As a matter of fact it is from a Republican outfit, whose latest poll of the North Carolina race has Tillis beating Hagan by five points when virtually ever other poll has Hagan in front.)

Whose face?

I take the point about the noteworthy gaffes. Looking for an oval to fill in, Virginia voters are certain to be attracted to a candidate whose gaffes are forgettable, like when Gillespie accused the Affordable Care Act of making it too hard for women to buy birth control pills (by requiring their insurance companies to cover it without a co-pay, forcing them to accept it as part of their insurance policy), or when he explained to Virginia Beach voters that the federal minimum wage shouldn't be raised because

"A minimum wage job is where you learn to get to work on time. It's where you learn the great feeling at the end of a week of getting that paycheck, of knowing you gave an honest week's work.... It's where you play on the work softball team or go out for a beer after work"

—presenting a somewhat surprising picture of what it's like to be a home health care worker or office cleaner. Softball, really?

• Women make up about two-thirds of all workers who are paid minimum wage or less, and 60 percent of full-time minimum wage workers.[1] Women are also two-thirds of workers in tipped occupations.[2] These workers provide care for children and frail elders, clean homes and offices, and wait tables. 
• Women of color are disproportionately represented among minimum wage workers. Twenty-two percent of minimum wage workers are women of color,[3] compared to less than 16 percent of workers overall.[4]
• More than three-quarters of women earning the minimum wage are age 20 or older,[5] and most do not have a spouse’s income to rely on.[6]

Whereas

as he has been in the Senate, Warner has been most invisible in the race, relying on his name recognition and his good reputation from his previous stint as governor.

Imagine the handicap of running on a good reputation. Not Gillespie's problem, that. Oh, and where did you learn your English, Jennifer? "Why, he's 'most invisible, Ma'am."

Is it possible? In a wave election, a lot of challengers get swept in, especially ones who have run good races. The question for Gillespie remains: How big a wave will there be?

Or where do waves even come from? Like in this paragraph there are two waves, and I totally did not see them coming. Looks like Rubin didn't either and they knocked her right off her feet.

Photo by Scott R. Galvin/AP, via CBS. Not that these girls (from the dissident Amish sect of Bergholz, Ohio) get paid minimum wage, or at all. They have religious freedom to do what Bishop Mullet of the local Boko Haram chapter tells them. I hope to hell they get out of there and somewhere where the federal government can do something.

Update November 5:

Oops, this seems a little overconfident, in hindsight. I'm still confident, though, that there was no Republican wave: nobody ran out with a passion to vote for Ed Gillespie, or Charlie Baker, or Mitch McConnell. They were elected by the folks who stayed home because they didn't see an alternative compelling enough to leave the house for—many of them people who managed to get out and vote for Obama. It was a wave of apathy.