From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: It must officially be two weeks before Election Day because the leashes are now off. This afternoon, while Mike Huckabee was telling a Missouri television station that Barack Obama’s high school and college drug use should be a legitimate campaign issue, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox News complaining that the media [...]

From TIME’s Massimo Calabresi: In the nearly sixteen thousand words uttered last night in the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, one was noticeably absent: God. The deity got not a single mention, not even a perfunctory “God Knows,” or “Good God,” or “God Bless America”. In fact, in the three presidential debates, McCain [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: As he did for the first presidential debate, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg gathered a group of undecided voters in a swing state (this time Colorado) to watch the town hall, polling them before and after to gauge how their reactions to the presidential candidates changed. The audience of 50 voters was [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: Last night in Colorado (one of the key swing states we have our eyes on), the Democratic polling group Greenberg Quinlan Rosner brought together 40 undecided women voters to watch the vice-presidential debate. In pre-interviews before the festivities started, most of the women admitted that they didn’t know much about either [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: Sarah Palin’s handling of Roe v. Wade questions last night is getting all the attention. But Katie Couric asked another question of both running mates: Why do you think it’s important to have a wall separating church and state? Each of them got half of the answer, but in doing so [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: I’d missed this, but apparently Sarah Palin has taken to joking on the campaign trail that she’s been listening to Joe Biden’s speeches since she was a second-grader. The point, according to what she tells Katie Couric in a segment to air tonight, is to highlight the choice voters have in [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan: Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg ran a dial-group with 45 undecided voters in St. Louis during the debate, polling them before and after to judge how the event changed their reactions to Obama and McCain. The group was mostly middle-aged, split evenly among education and class lines, and was heavily comprised of [...]

From TIME’s Amy Sullivan Rudy Giuliani becomes the first Republican speaker to describe what John McCain endured in the POW camp as “torture.” CORRECTION: Jay Carney tells me Huckabee spoke the T-word first. Apologies, and kudos to Huck. “Beatings and isolation” was kinda wordy anyway.