gwen: as the campaign enters its final weekend, it's all over but the shouting and the voting. what's going to happen tuesday? we'll give you our best reporting, tonight on "washington week." >> i've been called a liar, i've been called a whore, i've been called a nazi by the brown campaign. >> i was careless and i misstated part of my military record. i learned a painful lesson. >> reid, it's clear whose side he's on, and it's not yours. >> immigration is all my fault, and then she attacks my credibility, my honesty. gwen: a last-minute avalanche of accusations and anger, as republicans build up a head of steam. >> my opponent is not a witch. but she sure has conjured up

some pretty crazy votes in d.c. >> let me say this about members of congress. >> are you going to curse? >> no, i'm not. >> you want to build a middle-class america, you've got to vote for the democrats. gwen: a world of uncertainty for democrats, for republicans, and for the balance of power in washington. covering the campaign, dan balz of "the washington post," jeanne cummings of "politico," major garrett of "national journal," and jeff zeleny of "the new york times." >> award-winning reporting and analysis, covering history as it happens. live from our nation's capital, this is "washington week" with gwen ifill, produced in association with "national journal." corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> this rock has never stood still. since 1875, we've been there for our clients through good times

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additional funding for "washington week" is provided by the ethics and excellence in journalism foundation, the anenburg foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. once again, live from washington, moderator gwen ifill. gwen: good evening. well, no matter what happens, tuesday is going to be a long night for the folks around this table, and perhaps for you, too. stuart rothen berg says house democrats face a political blood bath, as big as anything since f.d.r., 55 to 65 seats lost. charlie cooke reported democratic net loss of 50 to 60 seats. both say the numbers could well be higher. things are slightly less rosy for republicans in the senate, where the field of competitive races is considerably more

narrow. so this has been a week where candidates from coast to coast have been throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. it helps that it's halloween, because there's a lot of scary stuff out there. ♪ >> i'll tell you, i have looked at global warming, now climate change from both sides, and i don't believe -- well, i think the earth is warming, i don't think that man-made causes are the primary factor for global warming. >> my opponent is not a witch. but she sure has conjured up some pretty crazy votes in d.c. >> like a fright on wall street, and scary from fannie mae and freddy mack. night marrish deficits for as far as the eye can see. >> kirk lied about going to war,

opposed middle class tax cuts and said unemployment is not that big an issue. gwen: oh, my goodness. you want me to scream? i won't do that. what's going to happen in those three races in colorado, alaska, and illinois. house and senate candidates do know that with a third of the ballots already cast early, they're bracing for a tuesday earthquake. so a question for the table tonight is what is the biggest question, dan, that you would like to see answered come tuesday? >> a couple questions, gwen. one is will there be a middle-left in american politics after this election? this election has been an enormously polarizing election in a very polarized country. and everything that has happened over the last several months in the final stages of this i think has driven the country farther apart. the other thing that i am interested in and i think everybody around the table is what is the net effect of the tea party this year? how strong are they?

have they been a net-plus for the republicans? which the republicans certainly hope and believe. or will they cost the republicans some important senate seats? gwen: jeanne, what about you? >> one thing i.d. like to -- i'd like to see after this election is, does obama have any juice left? because he stayed out for a really long time, engaged after labor day, and in the last couple weeks, he's put whatever credibility and whatever political capital he's got left on the line. i think going into virginia for that was a major risk, because tom -- gwen:ing in charlottesville. >> he's a liberal democrat in a conservative district, who is not running away from his record, so he's facing a very, very tough re-election. and for obama to put some skin in that game, that was a big call by the white house. and i'd like to see if there's anybody who actually gets saved because the president came in.

gwen: major? >> it's related to what dan was saying and it sounds a bit esoteric. we had a big change election in 2006, a change election in 2008. this will clearly be a change election in 2010, all reflecting some imbedded level of disappointment in the country. can that disappointment yield to what socrates may have called a dialectic, even when they per sue the truth? this country has structural economic problems. a lot of republicans know they'll have a big night on election night, but they know if they don't do something with president obama to address the jobs situation, they too will share part of the blame. can america find a way from disappointment to discussion and solutions? gwen: can you top socrates, jeff? >> i'm going to be socrates for halloween. just kidding. one question, is this going to happen every four years? is the house of representatives now going to be a chamber that switches power every four years?

i mean, obviously for 40 years, it was locked in by democrats until 1994, and then it changed in 2006. it's a phenomenon in the american politics that the house will never be held. the question is, is there any room for bipartisanship inside the house? will there be any type of responsibility-sharing with this president? we'll find out. gwen: even though the republicans look like they're poised to have a good night on tuesday, there is no guarantee that that means that things completely shift, things completely flip. the backlash is that the democrats could turn the other way. you've been around the country talking to people. what is at the root of this grim mood, which is anti-republican as well as democrat in some ways? >> well, one is the obvious, which is the economy. you know, we can state it over and over again, but you can't overstate how important it is to people and how it has affected

people's lives. when i was out talking to people in three different states over the last week, i mean, what just came through was this sense that we had gone through something very, very traumatic and we're not really out of it at all. i think people are more pessimistic with some of the economic numbers, frankly. so there's that. the second is that there has been a big debate set off because of what president obama and the democrats have done about the size and scope of government, and for a considerable part of the electorate this fall, that is alarming. and that is part of what is going to have to be reckoned with after tuesday. >> just to add on to dan's thought regarding the economy, clearly independents and the swing of independents is a major reason the democrats are facing such a hard cycle. the independent profile now is very pro-republican. in 2006 and 2008, they were very

pro-democratic. if you go back into 2009 when the unemployment rate hit 9.5% in the start of that summer, that is when it happened. there's just this flight of the independents. obama had him at 63% when he did the stimulus, and in the summer, they dropped to 40 and they haven't moved an inch since. so i think that also goes to dan's point about how intractable this problem is for the democrats because the economy just hasn't gotten better fast enough for the people. gwen: so let's break it down in case of specific races. the mid-term is not a national race like it is the presidential race. in nevada, we see that the senate majority leader is poised to have his job taken away from someone who not long ago no one gave a chance to. how do these things all boil down in a place like nevada? >> it's not just the economy. it's anxiety. unemployment has been persistently long, and there is not an economist in this country

who is optimisticly projecting a reduction of unemployment of any substantial means for the next two to three years. the white house is not projecting a rapid reduction in unemployment for the next two or three years. so you have americans who are increasingly unemployed for a very long time, that means they're falling behind in the worker retraining cycle. if they haven't already become engaged because of their mortgage payments, they are now fearing losing their house after having lost their job. that anxiety is at a personal level. in nevada it plays out because the mortgage crisis has been enormous there. the shuttering of construction opportunities has been enormous there. these issues come to the floor, and harry reid is stuck because he says i'm blamed for all this. well, yes, you're held accountable. it's also true in wisconsin, where you've had historically a very popular renegade democrat russ feingold losing to another semiwell-known business-type republican who doesn't have a great political profile, because working class whites in wisconsin, more than any other state in this country, feeling

this economic anxiety have fled the democratic party. gwen: but take me to a place like washington state, which is not taking the hit in the economy quite the same way, yet patty murray who is the incumbent senator, three terms, is in trouble there. how does that filter down? >> it is interesting, because that is one of the blue states. gwen: right. in fact, the president is spending the whole weekend campaigning in blue states. >> he is. in one respect, because the people in red states don't want him to come. even some blue states. what's happening in washington is interesting. if senator murray was running against any other republican, perhaps an unknown, it might not be as close of a race as it is. but she's running against edie that rossi,. this may be his year. very close. there has always been a third party candidate in the race. this year there's not, it's just the two of them. she is facing the same problem that all incumbents are facing,

she represents washington. mr. rossi is a politician, he's not a newcomer to this. but i think back to wisconsin, i traveled to wisconsin in august, and i sat down with senator feingold, and at that point, a lot of people didn't necessarily think he had a tough race. and he said that he had detected this since the month after president obama was inaugurated. he holds all these town meetings. he said the anger was so ripe, even some democrats that he had seen in some of these counties were coming up to him and were so angry by this. he had seen this coming, but if he does not pull it out on election night, i think he will be one of the sort of people that we remember who was defeated this year, because senator feingold seems unbeatable to many people in washington, but not in a year like this. gwen: another incumbent who seems unbeatable, but has only been there two years, is in colorado. and the interesting thing about that is it is once again another

state which recently turned blue, and which no one seems to have anything particularly against the incumbent, but he still is in a tough fight. >> well, he's an incumbent, michael bennett, but he's an appointed incumbent. he's never won an election. gwen: it should help in a year like this. >> it should, but he's part of the party in power. and he's running against the tea party candidate, who was in many ways a surprise winner of the primary. and who has made a number of mistakes along the way. i mean, ken buck has got kind of a boot-in-mouth problem that has caused him trouble. and i think the question -- this race is one of the closest in the country. michael bennett has run a reasonably good race, but the state has never fully warmed to him because he's not been around that long, and the question i think will be when people go to the voting booth, are they going to sort of forgive some of the things that ken buck has said because they're just tired of what they're getting out of

washington? >> we can't really leave colorado without talking about the ad war, because colorado is ground zero. i've been going through and looking at where these outside groups with millions of dollars are playing, and if you go across the country, they sort of team up here and team up here and team up there. in colorado, they're all in. and there's at one point -- and this was early on. so my number is going to be way off, because they spent a lot more. and this was only maybe a week ago. i looked at it, and they had spent $27 million, almost all of it, directed at senator bennett, attacking him. and there are 2.4 million active voters in colorado. and the outside groups alone had spent $27 million there. and that's the low number. it went up. and these ads, you see them. they're hard, they're mean, and they're not just meant to undermine the candidate. these are intended, in the words

of an american cross roads spokesman, to throw gasoline on the fire. they are meant to make people mad. gwen: but when you add all the money together, not just the independent expenditures, aren't democrats outspending republicans? >> democrats -- in the end, we'll see where they end up, because we still have spending going on. democrats, despite some of their "poor me" language, they had a gigantic war chest coming into this. and they had raised almost $300 billion in their parting machinery, which is why the republican activist started these outside groups. >> this is colorado's lucky event. there's a couple of things i think are interesting. if you look at the heartiest and most stubborn of the democrats, it's college-educated white women in particular. in colorado, one of reasons michael bennett has bounced back is because women's issues have become more part of the conversation. ken buck has been rhetorically insensitive about women during

the primary, and there was an allegation from a rape victim that as a prosecutor he did not carry forth as aggressively as his victim wanted in the rape case there. that conversation teamed up with the sturdy support of college-educated white women in colorado has put michael bennett back in that race. the other phenomenon in colorado, you have to look at the governor's race. tom running on a very aggressive anti-immigration platform as a third-party candidate is now running nearly even with the democratic nominee, and the republican candidate is below 10%. and that anti-immigrant, sort of conservative third party mentality will probably feed into some degree into ken buck's future in that race. that's another dynamic in colorado. gwen: let's go to illinois, your former home state. where we have a senate race between alexei, who is a great friend of the president, and mark, a former congressman -- current congressman. and they're bumping noses right up against each other.

>> and there's no race in america that has a higher share of undecided voters than illinois. it's some 15%. gwen: are they still undecided? >> or they won't vote. and the race there is so personal and so nasty. but there really has become a sense of, you know, voters may not want either one of them. but what's happening underneath that electorate is there's years of scandal in illinois. there was just a big trial. rod blagojevich, of course, his first trial, now he's having a second trial next year. there's a lot of distrust of government, probably more than other places. and this race has not turned on any big issues. it's just been about one candidate accusing the other one of overstating his record, his military service record. the other candidate is accusing the democrat of being part of a mob bank. it's not about any bigger thing. but how does it turn out? who knows? this is another race i believe is way too close to call.

the president is going to chicago, the south side of chicago on saturday night for a rally, they're heaping to -- hoping to turn out the vote. this president did not want the democratic nominee, because they thought he was weak. he's 34 years old. i think that's a little bit young. gwen: you spent a lot of time in ohio this week and there's another one that's just like that. >> the ohio governor's race is i believe one of the more interesting races in the country right now. governor ted strickland, democrat, first term, is in the fight of his life with john casic, who tells everyone everywhere he goes that he was a key player in balancing the budget. and right now, this should be a race where the democrat is way behind. he's lost 400,000 jobs. for some reason, it's not quite working there. so the democratic party is hoping that there will be spots across the country, on wednesday morning that they can turn to and say, look, the democratic party is not entirely dead. there are some places, but president obama is going through on sunday, too.

it's all about 2012. gwen: there's just not a lot of blue left on any map for any of these races, whether it's the house, senate, governor's races. it makes me wonder about what it is, the source of the nervousness that politicians are exploiting, that politicians are tapping into this year, and is there a common thread that you've been able to detect as you've looked around the country at this? >> one of the things that polling experts i talk to say they have found in focus groups is, first of all, that the white house overreached, that they wanted changing but not this much change. they haven't been able to absorb all of the change. and so by putting republicans in congress, it creates a major break. and a time-out. and so no more big obama initiatives can go through until they figure out what has already passed. gwen: there are people who say the white house overreached and there are those who say they underreached. i saw the president talk to jon

stewart here this week. let's listen to their exchange. >> so much of what you said is great leaders lead in a time of opportunity. yet legislatively, it has felt timid at times, that i'm not even sure at times what you want out of a health care bill. >> and this is -- jon, i love your show. but this is something where, you know, i have a profound disagreement with you and i don't want to lump you in with a lot of other pundits, but this notion -- [laughter] >> you may. >> this notion that health care was timid -- you've got 30 million people who are going to get health insurance as a consequence of this. gwen: if you're lost on stewart -- you get apathy on the left, energy on the right. there's the enthusiasm gap that we've been talking about so much. >> it is that.

and the health care bill is symbolic of that. if you talk to liberal democrats along the campaign trail, almost to a person, they will bring up the public option, which they thought was essential to a good health care bill. they didn't get it, they are unhappy. to them, it embodies exactly what they are most disappointed about in clinton, that they thought he was going to bring in real dramatic change, progressive change. they don't feel it's been there. >> of course, the white house perspective on this, the liberal left, has set itself up for its own disagreement. the president never campaigned on the public option. never established it as a preliminary goal or a goal throughout the process. gwen: it doesn't matter what the actual facts were apparently. >> the other point about what can be detected out there, i talked to kevin mccarthy, one of these very aggressive young republicans who could get a number three leadership position, he said, look, there's a behavioral disconnect that voters see. their personal behavior is about

saving and paying down credit card debt and holding on. what they see washington doing is running up the credit card through deficit spending or enlarging the federal debt, and they feel uncomfortable and at times angry about that behavioral difference. how they're living their lives and how their perceive washington living its life on the country's credit card. there are a lot of economists that say that's a good idea because you have to use that spending to help make the economy grow, but there's a certain swath of american voters who simply don't believe it. >> i -- gwen ifill i guess the bottom line here is whether 2010 will be a year of evolution or revolution. which do you think? >> i think i'll say revolution. i'm not sure if they will be re-elected to a second term. i vote revolution. gwen: dan? >> i agree with jeff. i think this election is likely to bring in a class of -- a very big class of very conservative

republicans. they are going to be bumping up against the republican leadership, let alone the president. and that is going to cause real problems over the next two years. gwen: and we're glad to hear what you guys think about in the webcast. we'll pick up where we left off. thank you, everyone. if you're thinking we just scratched the surface, you're right. go to pbs.org for our "washington week" webcast. be sure to tune in tuesday. before we go, a special shoutout to a special fan. thanks to nasa -- i got to talk by phone with astronaut shannon walker. she told me she follows "washington week" when she's at home with in houston with her husband andy who is also an astronaut, and in space from where she gets the podcast. she says she doesn't mind being off the planet right now. for those of you who are earth-bound, we'll have all the results and analysis next week on "washington week." happy halloween and good night.

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