Sarah Palin is back on the road, looking to smooth over her recent PR missteps with a quiet tour of the continental US. Last week, with little fanfare, she flew into New York. But today she’s back in the limelight, as she has been uninvited from speaking at the NRCC fundraising dinner tonight for fear that she’d upstage kenynote speaker Newt Gingrich. Whoops! Nate Silver thinks Alaska is an unlikely state for a female governor, but then he got to number crunching and found that the more males in a district, the more likely it is to vote for female candidates. More fun with statistics: People who are freaked out by bugs are more likely to be conservative. The big Virginia primary vote is tomorrow. The latest polls show Creigh Deeds with a solid lead, but there are some questions about just how trustworthy those polls are. Mark Blumenthal looks at three key factors on which the race will depend. Obama got in trouble during the campaign for borrowing a few words from his friend Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Now Patrick is borrowing something back: his campaign manager. David Plouffe will be advising Patrick in 2010. Other odds & ends:
The new political strategy is the same as the old political strategy: keep running against Bush. But will it still work? Arlen Specter gives a speech before the state party, winning a standing ovation (but not from Joe Sestak). The White House press shop is not doing such a hot job, according to Alex Conant. A new way to design your campaign website: crowdsourcing.