So how far is Gov. Mitch Daniels ahead of challenger Jill Long Thompson?  One percent?  Twenty-two percent?  Something in between?  Those are the numbers from the crazily skewing polls we’ve been seeing in the last couple of weeks.  Most have Daniels comfortably ahead, with some in the near-landslide zone.  But a couple of polls showing his lead in the low single digits keep us from declaring this race over.

  Here’s something to remember.  Long Thompson hasn’t been running any TV ads for about a month.  That’s about the same time she closed a bunch of her campaign offices.  With now less than a month to go before the election, you’d have to think that if her campaign isn’t completely poverty stricken, she’d be back on TV.  That would indicate that the internal polls, the ones we don’t see but the big contributors do, are bad for Long Thompson.  Otherwise, they’d be opening their wallets to fund the October commercials that might be her only chance.

  Debate number three next Tuesday might provide another chance for a comeback.  But based on the first two debates, Long Thompson hasn’t really done anything to move the numbers.

  What scares Daniels’ people, I’m sure, is the prospect of a Barack Obama landslide in Indiana.  Yes, I know that even a narrow Democratic presidential victory in Indiana qualifies as historical.  But what if things continue deteriorating for John McCain and Obama opens up a really substantial lead in Indiana?  What if all those newly registered voters who haven’t been to the polls before don’t bother to take the extra effort to split their tickets?  What if they just check “Democratic” and walk out the door?  That has to keep Daniels up at night just a little bit at least.

Faced with a presidential race that’s all tied up in Indiana, the Guv’s promoters have been chattering about a creature whose birth no one could ever have predicted: the Obama-Daniels voter.

Republicans I’ve talked to think that up to 25 percent of Obama’s supporters will swing to support Mitch Daniels in November.

But Daniels was one of McCain’s earliest supporters, right? Won’t he go to the mat to make sure Indiana turns presidential red at two minutes past six on election night? A story reported tonight by WRTV’s Rick Hightower makes it pretty clear that the Guv is in it for himself:

“He’d better win here, or I’d say his national chances aren’t good at all,” Daniels said of McCain. He went on to say that “I told them at the outset I have a full-time job, and my mind is on the problems of Indiana, that I would be happy to lend my name, but they couldn’t really count on me to spend much time on things, and they’ve held up their end of that bargain.”

Average Hoosiers might not pick up on the significance of these comments, but this says to me that Daniels has thrown McCain under the bus because his fortunes depend far more on Obama’s fate here.

The Guv’s been running a change campaign of his own, and he can’t afford to have John W. Bush and Mrs. Dick Cheney II screw it up for him.

Meanwhile, Obama will be in town next Wednesday. Perhaps Daniels will consider a joint appearance?

A new poll from the South Bend Tribune and WSBT shows a tight gubernatorial race despite several recent polls indicating Mitch Daniels with a commanding lead:

A new statewide poll has found tight races for both president and governor in Indiana.

The South Bend Tribune/WSBT poll released Wednesday found 46 percent of likely voters favored Republican John McCain for president while 45 percent said they supported Democrat Barack Obama.

The same poll found 47 percent supported Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels while 46 percent said they support Democrat Jill Long Thompson.

The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.

The poll was a telephone survey of 600 likely voters conducted Monday and Tuesday by Research 2000.

Yesterday, SurveyUSA showed Daniels leading Thompson by 16 points.

Who’s right?

I guess we’ll find out in 33 days. I still think Daniels, unfortunately, has this one in the bag. If the going truly gets tough, we’ll know it because he’ll go on the offensive against the opponent he’s otherwise been able to ignore for the past five months.

This is two days in a row I’m going to give linky love to the Indianapolis Star, but Matt Tully wrote a darned good column this morning. You should read it.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has bungled his response to valid questions about his use of state airplanes, and that response has kept the issue alive for more than a month now.

With Election Day approaching, Daniels and his campaign continue to offer dismissive answers to the questions hovering around him. The strategy seems clear: ignore this issue and hope it goes away.

I’ve said plenty of nice things about the Guv’s campaigns — this one and the one he ran in 2004. Don’t get me wrong: Both campaigns have been largely predicated on the world as Daniels would like it to be, not the world as it actually is. But no one can argue that the guy doesn’t have some political savvy.

Which is what makes Travelgate so perplexing to me.

Six weeks ago, when the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette broke this story, all he had to do was say, “Oops, you know, in retrospect, maybe this doesn’t look perfect. I’m running the cleanest administration since the dawn of time, so I’m going to pay the money back.” (Note: Cleanest administration where several several top-level aides have made front-page news for their ethical lapses.)

Instead, he chose to put his spokesfolks out there to defend his honor.

That’s the side of Mitch Daniels that always comes out if you give him long enough, the side we saw at both gubernatorial debates and the side that defined his first two years in office.

Put succinctly: “I am always right.”

When you handle a crisis communications situation, the hardest part is getting the person who’s under the microscope to understand two things: (1) it’s not as bad as you think it is; (2) we can make this go away, but you’re probably going to feel a little sting.

Instead of swallowing his pride and eating the one-day story that would have come out of giving the money back, Daniels is now stuck having to endure once-a-week barbs from his opponent, Jill Long Thompson.

Now, he doesn’t really have to worry unless she manages to get back up on the air with a significant buy and a good spot that hits this issue hard. Even then, it may be too late. She hasn’t had ads up for weeks, and now that the RNC/McCain is playing here, it’s going to be even harder to break through the presidential noise.

All of which is really too bad, because those of us who’ve paid close attention to Daniels over the past three years know all too well that this is the kind of behavior that’s not so well hidden beneath the flannel shirts and baseball caps.

Survey USA is reporting Governor Mitch Daniels with a 16-point lead over Democratic challenger Jill Long Thompson.  The survey of 687 likely voters showed Daniels leading  53-37.   The poll was taken Sunday and Monday of this week.

What’s interesting about this poll is that Daniels is leading in all areas of the state.

• Northern IN, 46-42.
• Central IN, 56-32.
• Indianapolis, 59-34.
• Southern IN, 56-38.