The paper that has done everything it could to make sure that 8th District Congresswoman Melissa Bean gets re-elected is running a major article in Sunday’s.

The Daily Herald's web site headline on the article.

Melissa Bean

Joe Walsh

Lowering the risk of being on the wrong side is my guess.

The Daily Herald relentlessly publicized Republican challenger Joe Walsh’s financial woes with regard to a condo purchase gone bad, plus other stuff that I can’t remember.

The effort to make certain that liberal Melissa Bean had no significant opposition was so blatant that I thought at the time the paper should send Bean a statement estimating the value of its in-kind campaign contribution to her.

But now reporter Kimberly Pohl has been tasked to try to explain why Walsh is still in the race. It’s as if she had read my article explaining the New York Times blogger Nate Silver having lowered Bean’s odds of winning from 97.8% to 80.6%.

Results from the We Ask America phone poll. Click to enlarge.

This comes over two weeks after a very large (1,381–the largest I have ever seen in a congressional race–We Ask America telephone poll showed a 41% to 41% tie, with Green Party candidate Bill Scheurer getting 5%.

That, bizarrely, showed up in the Quincy Herald-Whig.

Strangely enough, the poll interviewed 56.1% woman and and 43.88% men.

This is what pollsters call "cross tabs."

Most neutral observers would suggest than overweights women. And since women were going for Bean 44% to 40% , maybe the survey really indicated that Walsh was ahead.

The article ends by summarizing University of Illinois at Springfield Professor Kent Redfield cautioning “that no Democrat in a potential swing district should feel safe, particularly with such strong anti-incumbent sentiment.”