Polls: NYT/CBS has Obama 52%, McCain 41%, while Gallup's unchanged at 51%-44%, but take it from Barack Obama, in a USA Today interview: "I worry that people start thinking these national polls mean something. They don't." He reminds supporters of the New Hampshire primary, where he led by 10 points in polls but lost to Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, it's a dead heat in North Carolina and Missouri, and nationally, one in seven voters say they're still persuadable.
Halloween is the ultimate expression of the American democratic experiment, says this Baltimore Sun writer, who'll be way less thrilled about it after the 87th child dressed as Sarah Palin or Batman has called at his house tonight demanding candy. [Baltimore Sun]
Obama heads home to Chicago tonight to be "trick-or-treater in chief", his senior advisor Robert Gibbs says. He "doesn't know what he'll dress up as." [The Hotline]
Is Osama bin Laden going to rear his head for a Halloween surprise video message? Analysts think he'll feel the need to, "if only for public relations purposes." [ABC News]
If it all goes chaotic on Tuesday, it's going to go chaotic in Ohio, which guarantees its attention-seeking role in the limelight of US elections by vastly overusing provisional ballots. [New York Times]
Obama was on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last night. It was always going to be a love-in, but she was one of the few mainstream interviewers to lob the candidate a few questions from the left. Here's highlights. [Gawker]
A 93-year-old South Carolina woman at death's door, energised late in life by the election, holds on long enough to cast her vote: "She made her mark, and we put it in the envelope, my brother and I walked to the mailbox, it was 11 o'clock Wednesday morning... and less than an hour later, she died." [WCIV Charleston]
As rumours fly about Obama's choice of chief of staff as president (will it be Rahm Emanuel?) the Moustache of Destiny speaks: David Axelrod refuses to discuss the post-election landscape, but says the campaign has "got two drafts going" for Obama's Tuesday-night speech. "We're prepared for any exigency. They're not done, we're just starting to think about it now." [Time]
An exceedingly cool web gadget allows you to chart the progress of political viral videos through the liberal and conservative blogosphere. How "Chimpanzee Rides Segway" is political, I'm not sure, but still. [Shifting The Debate]
This hilarious recording, apparently, is of a canvassing voicemail left by a Barack Obama campaign worker who's clearly been driven to drink in these last, frazzled stages of the election race. [Gawker]
[Picture: Cafe Press]
