The poll finds Republicans in an unusual position: on the brink of making political gains while the party and its policies are unpopular. Likely voters are evenly divided on the Republican Party, with 47 percent holding a positive opinion. [...]

Republicans have said they want to cut $100 billion from the federal budget as early as January. That would amount to 21 percent of the government’s so-called discretionary spending and target programs such as college loans for low-income students or medical research at the National Institutes of Health.

Less than one-third of poll respondents — 31 percent — say they support cutting federal spending in areas such as education and health care, excluding Social Security, Medicare and defense.

Of course, these numbers won’t by any means stop a new Republican Congress from claiming a wide mandate to enact its agenda. Besides the obvious numerical calculus entailed in controlling the Senate, this is one of the reasons that the Senate races coming down to the wire in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wisconsin and Nevada are so important.

The candidates representing the GOP in these races are all true believers in deeply conservative causes, and a victory for them would certainly seem like a sign that the nation has moved significantly to the right. If they loose, however, writes E. J. Dionne, it’ll make Republican claims of a sea change that much harder to justify:

So far, being righter-than-right has been anything but helpful. O’Donnell’s nomination virtually sealed a victory for Democrat Chris Coons. In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, after spending the summer under assault from anonymously funded conservative groups, has been closing in on tea party favorite Ken Buck. In Wisconsin, Sen. Russ Feingold has narrowed Republican Ron Johnson’s once substantial lead.

In Alaska, the tea party’s Joe Miller faces a formidable write-in challenge from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whom he defeated in the Republican primary, even as Democrat Scott McAdams battles to sneak through on the GOP split.

Republican Rand Paul has clung to a lead over Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky, a very red state where a Republican should not be having so much trouble. As for Nevada, nobody knows if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will prevail over marquee tea party candidate Sharron Angle, but Angle’s bizarre brand of conservatism is the one thing giving Reid a fighting chance.

O’Donnell was added after her victory and spoke for about 20 minutes.

“The stimulus spent a trillion dollars on a Keynesian fantasy,” she said. “Then they started talking about Obamacare and the bailouts, bailing out one industry after another,” the social conservative activist said.

“The conservative movement was told to curl up in a fetal position for eight years … well how things have changed,” she said. Her rhetoric was often against the “elite”: “The elite don’t get us — they call us wacky, they call us wingnuts, but we call us ‘we the people’!” She continued later, “the ruling elites may try to be our master … but we say, ‘You’re not the boss of me!’”

She had some one-liners that the crowd loved: “They [government] will buy your teenage daughter an abortion, but not a sugary soda in a school’s vending machine.” Or, she mentioned the “green police” in Alexandria, Va., putting “cameras in your recycling bins.”

She compared her movement to the “chosen people of Israel” and added, “it is almost like we’re in constitutional repentance.” She also opposed extending unemployment benefits, mocking the current Congress: “They say the best way to job is to endlessly extend unemployment benefits!”

The number of reporters in the press area approximately doubled before she spoke at about 3:20 p.m. After her speech, international and national anchors from FOX and ABC like Greta Van Susteren and Jake Tapper (and dozens of other reporters) waited for a chance to talk to her outside the ballroom, but she never appeared. The master of ceremonies asked for a prayer for Christine O’Donnell to protect her from “whatever you see” in the media, who will “attack” her. Or, as she said in her speech, “will they attack us … smear our records … is it worth it? Yes!”

The instant celebrity and conservatism of O’Donnell beg comparisons to the woman who robocalled for her, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. (Indeed, it was rumored that Palin might be the surprise guest of the afternoon — however, she was in Iowa.)

But does it translate to votes? The polls say no, with her trailing New Castle County Executive Chris Coons by 11 to 16 points. That didn’t matter to most of the speakers. Tea party organizer Amy Kremer said, “She’s not a good ol’ boy — she can beat Chris Coons.” Rick Santorum, when asked by a reporter whether she could win, said, “Of course she can. Have you seen the polls?”

But polls didn’t matter today. The results of the election are six weeks away. It was all celebrity and enthusiasm. In the words of O’Donnell, “We will be resisted and we must resist!”

This post originally appeared in The American Independent.

O’Donnell’s CNN interview came right after the Southern Baptists took a hard-line, conservative turn at their conference in Salt Lake City. At the meeting, the group added a resolution to their statement of beliefs that said a wife should ”submit herself graciously” to her husband.

Two days after the conference accepted the resolution, O’Donnell, president of the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), defended the language. Responding to CNN host Mary Tillotson, O’Donnell argued that God designed family structures as such so that wives should be subservient to the leadership of their husbands.

O’Donnell’s comments according to a transcript of the appearance, found via LexisNexis:

OK, this is not about merely a Baptist doctrine. This is a biblical doctrine. And the passage from the Bible the Baptist article is taken from talks about a submissive family. And yet, what the media seems to be reacting to is the word “submit” in the wives. But yet, even in, Mary, your introduction, you ignored or you left out where it says they graciously submit to a servant leader. And that is God’s design for the family. It is not about dominating and it is not about being a slave to your husband.

O’Donnell’s view that wives should submit to their husbands is not “biblical doctrine” according to most Christian denominations. At the time the Southern Baptists wrote the statement, the rhetoric of wives submitting themselves was a break from other Christian faiths which had generally used the language of mutual submission to one another, rather than one spouse holding the power in a marriage. Efforts to weaken the Baptists’ statement were turned back, as the language of submitting had large support among conference attendees. The New York Times reported in 1998:

While the amendment says that husband and wife have ”equal worth” before God, the choice of words about marital relations also makes it one of the most conservative of such declarations. The amendment relies on biblical passages like Ephesians 5:22-33, which compares the husband-wife relationship to that of Christ ruling the church but which is seldom interpreted so literally these days among most Protestants and Roman Catholics.

This post originally appeared in The American Independent.

Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell stands with Tea Party protesters in Delaware. (O'Donnell campaign)

On the question of whether Christine O’Donnell — a two-time failed candidate and one-time anti-masturbation crusader — was suitable for office, Democratic and Republican operatives wholeheartedly agreed. She would never win the Delaware Republican Senate primary, they said this summer.

[Congress1] But tonight, voters begged to differ. A little after 9 p.m., the Associated Press declared that O’Donnell had beaten out nine-time Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), winning 53 percent of voters to Castle’s 47. She will now face Democrat Chris Coons, an attorney from Wilmington, for the Senate seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden in 2008. Democrats can rejoice that Coons, a long shot against Castle, now enjoys a substantial lead in most early polls against O’Donnell, who many believe is too radical to win a general election.

O’Donnell had run unsuccessfully as a candidate twice before in Delaware, and has a history of making bizarre statements — such as claiming she won counties in a race against Joe Biden. (She did not.) Thus, the media and even the Castle campaign ignored her through much of her primary bid.

Then came the Tea Party Express, a California-based organization whose PAC, Our Country Deserves Better, vocally supported O’Donnell. Exhilarated by an upset primary victory in Alaska, in which the group had propelled tea party candidate Joe Miller over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) by a tiny margin, Express promised to infuse political advertising dollars into the Delaware race and nudged Sarah Palin to eventually lend her star power to O’Donnell as well.

Like Alaska, Delaware has a small voting population and few media markets — making it easy for outside infusions of money to have a big impact on an election. Unlike Alaska, however, Republicans recognized the dire nature of O’Donnell’s challenge and began leaking juicy and unsavory tidbits about her character and history to any news outlet that would listen.

A Wilmington News Journal article from March surfaced, in which the local paper reported that O’Donnell had owed money to her university, on a home mortgage, and to the IRS at various points in the past, and that her campaign committee still owed money from her previous unsuccessful Senate run. A Weekly Standard piece featured O’Donnell making strange and unverifiable claims about her previous home and campaign offices being vandalized by her political opponents. And the Huffington Post reported that O’Donnell had no steady source of income.

This news, combined with more bitter, personal attacks against Castle — like the allegation of a former O’Donnell staffer that he was having a homosexual affair — drove many Republicans, even those sympathetic to or engaged in tea party politics, away from O’Donnell. RedState’s Erick Erikson publicly gave up on the candidate due to her campaign’s lack of professionalism. FreedomWorks, another tea party training ground, refused to get behind her.

The state GOP chairman, Tom Ross, for his part, was downright hostile to O’Donnell and the outside groups that got behind her. Ross repeatedly called O’Donnell a “perennial candidate” with no real ties to Delaware, and later commented that she “could not be elected dogcatcher.”

That fact that O’Donnell has now secured the GOP nomination presents an awkward problem for the Republican candidate and her state party, which had vowed not to help her should she win. O’Donnell will likely continue to receive aid from enthusiastic outside conservative groups, but will face an uphill battle in convincing mainstream organizations that she has a real shot at attracting independent or even moderate Republican votes.

Democrats, for their part, have a whole trove of opposition research against O’Donnell, found by Republican operatives who tried to discredit her campaign. Just yesterday, a former O’Donnell aide, Kristin Murray, recorded a robocall that labeled her “a complete fraud.”

“This is her third Senate race in five years. As O’Donnell’s manager, I found out she was living on campaign donations — using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt,” Murray said. “She wasn’t concerned about conservative causes. O’Donnell just wanted to make a buck.”

How does O’Donnell know this? He never makes that clear, preferring to write with a cat-got-a-canary coyness that suggests authority but could easily conceal total ignorance:

The recent ugliness of the McCain-Palin rally audiences cannot be lost on Colin Powell. And Powell is not one to ignore a 14 point lead in a New York Times poll. But most important for Powell and the press will be his explicit rejection of the Bush-McCain approach to Iraq, Iran and the rest of the world.

Maddening stuff. Is O’Donnell saying that Powell will endorse Obama or that he should? Despite the depths to which his service to George W. Bush plunged him, Powell remains a massively popular and respected figure, and if there’s any undecided voter left in the country, Powell’s endorsement would push him or her to Obama.

But that’s not the same thing as being able to report that Powell will endorse Obama! Allison, if I ever wrote anything like O’Donnell just wrote, would you ever in a million years publish it?