Let’s look at the political map in the wake of the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL.

Dems really have their hopes up of taking the House and making a run at the U.S. Senate.

Sorry about that.

The Dems need 15 more to take control of the House.  In the 15 seats most competitive, the GOP holds leads in 4, the Dems have leads in 7 and four are just too close to call.

The problem is the GOP get out the vote effort in the last 72 hours of the election.  Starting Friday night before the Tuesday election, the GOP “microtargets” their most reliable voters (mostly evangelicals).  This is very effective.  It is so effective that the GOP outperforms the polling by about 3 percent.  In other words, if a poll shows a GOP candidate at 47 percent, that candidate will get to 50 percent on election day.

Factoring that in, in the 15 most competitive races, the GOP takes 8 or 9 of the races, leaving the Dems that many short of taking control of the House.

A similar analasis of U.S. Senate races brings us to the same place.  Dems need 5 seats to take control.  The Dems are losing in a N.J. race where the candidate is being smeared with corruption charges, so the Dems need 6 seats elsewhere.  It looks like the Dems will win in Penn. (against Santorum) and Washington, and are tied or have slim leads in places like Missouri and Tennessee.  However, when that 3 percent 72-hour GOTV machine kicks in, the Dems fall short.

So, how does the whole Foley thing play out?

The Dem hope is that the “values voters” that the GOP targets in the last 72 hours before election day will sit on their hands and not go vote, disenheartened by this latest attack on their core values and that Dems will, for once, outperform the polls because the energized “left” is angry and wants to “send a message” to Bush.

It could happen.

However, as Ring Lardner Jr. once wrote:  The race is not always to the swift, nor the fight to the strong, but that’s the way the smart money bets.