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It's almost as if we should expect to hear any moment now, about the death of Ronald Reagan; that would sew this election up as the repeat of 1984, that Republicans remember so fondly. One thing Reagan's timely death would do, is make the Republican claims that Democrats are politicizing Wellstone's death look pale in comparison. The images of Win One MORE For The Gipper, with a late Monday night rally of Bush & Simon in California, come to mind.

Short of that, Bush is doing his best to make the national election a mandate on Mondale-- or at least enough so as to fire up the conservative base to GOTV. Bush will be campaigning in Minnesota on Sunday, and Texas on Monday. As Bush's economic ratings free fall to below 50%, you have to hand it too the Republicans around the country; at least they will go down in defeat side by side their President. In '94, the flipside of this incoming election, the Democratic candidates fled from Clinton, which probably resulted in exasperating the Democratic losses.

I doubt very much the entrenched numbers in the Minnesota Senate race will move a single inch from where they stand right now (7-9% lead for Mondale); and certainly, Bush will not be able to budge them. The Governor's race in Minnesota is really up in the air though. The obvious loser in this partisan knuckle-brawl is the Independence Party. If this were three weeks out from the election, the two-Party fight might create a strong enough anti-duopoly vote to propel Penny. As it is, with just 5 days away from the election, voters are going to choose sides.

Where Penny lost the momentum was in his challenging the Republican Party's illegal financial backing of the Pawlenty ads. That pitted him against the Republican Party as a whole, which played into Pawlenty's claim that Penny and Moe were two sides of the same coin. The surge of late voters in Minnesota will not be the young male vote that propelled Ventura to victory-- they may just sit the election out. Instead, the voter intensity is going to be on the side of Wellstone sympathizers, and angry Coleman supporters. So it's probably Moe vs Pawlenty in the Governor's contest, and a coin-flipper for sure.

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