Ouch! - New Poll Out - Joe the Teabagger Down to the Bottom of His Base: 23% - Updated

This is bad.

Joe the Plummeter.

Even Papa Pilgrim would get 22% from Joe's base:

A pretty stunning new poll of Alaska's Senate race shows Joe Miller, the Republican candidate and clear favorite since his primary win, suddenly dropping to third place. And third place is a bad place to be, days before an election.

The poll shows Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whom Miller vanquished in his August primary with the help of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, presumably taking the lead as "write-in candidates" — effectively meaning her — got 34% of support. Democrat Scott McAdams is in second with 29%, and old has-been Joe Miller is now at 23%.

Update: Ivan Moore joins me in predicting a third-place finish for Joe the Plummeter:

After the reassignment of the 5 percent who can’t be bothered to vote a write-in, the vote changes to Lisa 35.6 percent; Joe 33.5 percent; Scott 30.9 percent. Then after a 10 percent chunk falls off Lisa through invalid write-in ballots (the equivalent of the invalidation of about 9,000 votes), the final result becomes Joe 34.7 percent; Lisa 33.3 percent; Scott 32.0 percent.

OK, we’ve got a real problem here, people. Joe wins.

The crazy thing is this. If the nonpartisans, instead of breaking 50–30–20 to Lisa–Scott–Joe, instead go 50–35–15, then Scott wins. If Lisa, instead of getting 50 percent, gets 52 percent of the nonpartisan vote, she wins. It really is poised on a knife-edge.

So this is what we do. We need to engineer a little unity in the No-Joe vote. I’m flipping a coin. No, I really am. Heads it’s Scott, tails it’s Lisa. OK? Is everyone agreed? OK?

Ivan goes on to predict "tails."

I'm more optimistic. Three out of five came up "heads" for me.