California voters may not care enough to go to the polls tomorrow.  A very low turnout’s expected.  But outside interests have cared enough to spend tens of millions of dollars.

And so, after all the crosstalk, data-crunching, tealeaf-reading and plain-old speculation (present company included), we leave it to the voting public to tell us the composition of next year’s Congress and state governments.

As a Californian in a state so tilted in one political direction that few bother to run ads here, I am spared what a friend from Wisconsin, a major battleground state, describes as an endless barrage of political ads and messages this year.

There are many sources of uncertainty in election polling other than sampling error. One source of error that looms large in this year's closest races is undecided voters -- people who say they are going to vote, but don't know (or won't say) which candidate they prefer.