The smell of an upset in the UK election is starting to work its way across the pond. EJ Dionne of the Washington Post reports on it today.

His vision of Brown as Truman has much to recommend it — especially as Cameron is such a convincing Dewey.

The Republicans went into 1948 having swept the Congress two years before with the slogan Had Enough? — a pithier version of We Can’t Go On Like ThIs. Leading in the polls, Dewey, an establishment WASP who was the closest thing to an Old Etonian you’ll ever get in America, felt he only had to stay out of trouble to win.

But in the end, famously, it was the ‘little guy’ Truman who upset the man in the fancy striped pants.

Is Harry Reid really in trouble in Nevada as CNN suggests?

We’ll believe it when we see it. The state did, after all, go for Obama by 12 points in November.

Reid’s up for re-election in 2010.

Amazing. Democrat Murphy leads by just 65 votes out of 154,000 with all precincts counted.

Leads, not wins, because (groan) there are 10,000 absentee ballots knocking around.

We’ve see what happened in Minnesota and we know this is the shameful legacy of Al Gore, who, rather than doing a Nixon and putting America first, was so desperate to be president he launched the Florida recount chaos.

Is it too much to hope that these candidates will press the reset button on the conduct of America’s elections and simply let the count run its course? What happened to accepting the result that emerges without challenging the legitimacy of every single ballot?

The result itself? Depending on how you look at it, this is either a pretty good result for the Democrats in rural upstate New York, in a district won by a non-incumbent Republican with 73% in the post-9/11 mid-terms.

Or a decent result for the Republicans given that Kirsten Gillibrand won with 62% five months ago.

Politico is live blogging the NY-20 race today, with the latest buzz being that the Republican national leadership is lowering expectations, telling people not to read too much into the result.

Updates here on tomorrow’s special election in NY’s 20th district from Congressional Quarterly and ABC News.

The polls have it level, with a slight edge for Democrat Scott Murphy and the momentum apparently going his way. Obama carried the district by three points in November.

Remember how much fun it was when we had elections to watch? I’m even getting nostalgic for the Georgia run-off.

Next week we addicts get another fix when the House seat vacated by Hillary’s replacement in the Senate, Kirsten Gillebrand, is contested.

MSNBC brings us an update. They reckon it’s natural GOP territory and there’ll be much wailing and gnashing of teeth if the Republicans lose this.

A new CNN poll shows a majority of Americans saying President Obama is trying to do too much.

Is this a polite way of saying he’s in their faces all the time? On and on his permanent campaign goes, out to LA to address a town hall meeting today, followed by the Tonight Show tomorrow. It’s exhausting just watching it.

His numbers are good though: in the 60s on pretty much every issue in the CNN poll.

Before she starts thinking seriously about anything else, Gov Palin needs to make sure she gets re-elected in 2010, when the slightest hint of vulnerability will see Democratic money pour into the state in an effort to unseat her.

Her latest approval numbers: 64%. But quite a high negative also of 32%, with very few don’t knows.

And not surprisingly, that negative is exactly double what it was in the last poll taken before she got the VP nomination, where the approval rating was 80%.

She could do without fiascos like today’s over whether she is or isn’t going to be speaking in Washington in June.

The results of the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be released today. They’re voting on who should be the next presidential nominee. We’ll have an update.

Meanwhile a CNN poll shows Gov Palin just ahead of Huckabee and Romney.

UPDATE A big win for Romney, albeit with 20 per cent. Palin and Huckabee trail on 10 and 7 per cent.

We flagged up this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago. People don’t really have opinions on issues, they have opinions on people.

How else to explain this ABC/WaPo poll showing 64 per cent of Americans say they favour the Afghanistan troop surge, when as the report points out:

Support for the additional deployment contrasts with an ABC/Post poll in January, just before Obama took office, in which just 34 percent favored boosting U.S. forces, given the options of increasing, decreasing or holding the troop level

Just look at the wording on the question, number 41 on the pdf: Do you support or oppose Obama’s decision to send approximately 17,000 additional US military forces to Afghanistan?

Our italics. And there’s your answer.