Panic is passe...

...so I know you didn't find the headlines about the Gallup poll particularly distressing, but just in case, your best bet, as always, is to check in with Ruy Teixeira. Dipping deeper, he finds the good news buried under the lede...

1. Independents favor Kerry/Edwards by 11 points, 51-40.
2. First-time voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 21, 57-36.
3. Early voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 9, 52-43.
4. Young voters (18-29) favor Kerry/Edwards by 9, 50-40, and seniors (65+) favor Kerry/Edwards by 15, 54-39.

and one weird note...

5. Men favor K/E by 50-46 and women favor Bush-Cheney by 49-43.

He's as confused as I am by that last point, and offers an idea...

...I had to look over those gender breakdown data several times to make sure I wasn't seeing things. And I'm still not sure they didn't somehow mislabel their categories. But if they didn't, it's certainly a head-scratcher. Perhaps they not only oversampled Republicans in general but Republican women in particular. Who knows.

...and Ezra Klein makes a point I consider indisputable...

In a country where Democratic party registration outpaces Republican and Democratic turnout regularly swamps Republican, it is, quite simply, impossible, for a Democratic campaign leading by 11% among independents to be behind in the polls. It gets significantly less impossible if you oversample Republicans by 6%, but you get the point. Further, our lead among first-time voters, early voters and young voters suggests that, assuming the huge turnout many of us expect, Kerry and the Democrats may end election night far, far ahead.

Yep, there's still lots of hard work ahead, and we've got to keep fighting for the next two weeks (and well beyond), but the bottom line is that we're winning this thing, and the fight is to preserve the victory.