No matter what any poll shows now, it will all come down to the ground game

It’ll come down to the ground game.

This election will not be won with slick TV commercials or newspaper ads or the money it takes to buy them. It will be determined by who has the incentive, the energy, the purposefulness, the motivation, the provocation, the wrath to actually go to the polls and cast a vote.

As week after week, the Mason-Dixon and other polls show Harry Reid and Sharron Angle locked in a virtual tie, I’ll stop by political writer Laura Myers’ and discuss what the pundits are saying. This week it was the independents were swinging Angle’s direction and the Republicans were inching up in the statewide constitutional officer races.

It’ll come down to the ground game, I invariably conclude. Will the well-financed, union-backed Democrats push their constituency out the door and into the polling booths? Will angry Tea Party types and deficit hawks storm the barricades?

This was the topic of a Peggy Noonan op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “The Enraged vs. the Exhausted.”

Noonan quotes Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who suggests the Republican base is not merely enraged but "livid."

"I look at this year as the Rage of the Bill-Paying Moms," Noonan continued quoting Rep. Blackburn. "They are saying 'How dare you, in your arrogance, cap the opportunities my child will have? You'll burden them with so much debt they won't be able to buy a house — all because you can't balance the budget.'"

Mothers and grandmothers are waking up to the debt being foisted on the next generations and they don’t like it one bit.

Even the Sun is beginning to note the ground game aspect.

After gleefully reporting today someone else’s poll showing Reid ahead by 5 points, over on the jump the reporters got around to noting the poll by Public Opinion Strategies used a sample that largely matched the actual voter registration in the state, 42 percent Democrat and 37 percent Republican.

The Mason-Dixon poll reported in the R-J on Friday showed the two Senate candidates knotted at 43 all. The poll sample included 43 percent Democrats and 41 percent Republicans.

The Sun story quoted Republican strategist Robert Uithoven on the poll, saying, “It would have to assume that turnout would identically model registration and that seems very unlikely in this cycle.”

Uithoven also was quoted saying, “You could have the best organization in the world, but if the voters themselves are not motivated to take it upon themselves to go vote, it doesn’t matter.”

Noonan also quoted the woman who stood up at an Obama town hall meeting and proclaimed:

“I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm an American veteran, and I'm one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are."

Who will go the polls? The exhausted or the enraged? We'll see.