Stories you shouldn’t miss:
1. Jerry Brown has opened up a thirteen-point lead over Meg Whitman with a little more than a week to go before the election, according to a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California poll released over the weekend. The poll shows Brown ahead 52 percent to 39 percent as an increasing number of Latino, women, and independent voters have distanced themselves from Whitman in the wake of Nannygate.
2. The same LA Times/USC poll has Barbara Boxer with an eight-point lead over Carly Fiorina, 50 percent to 42 percent. The results show a reversal of fortune for Fiorina, who had been closing the gap in other recent polls. Whitman and Fiorina immediately decried the poll as undercounting Republican voters. But the pollsters, a Democratic and Republican firm, contend that if anything, their poll has a slight Republican bent. Their polling model assumed that the number of Democrats who turn out to vote will be only 4 percentage points higher than the number of Republicans, even though Democrats have a 13-point registration advantage in California.