From Tuesday’s Note:

CQ’s Crawford: “I’d be a little scared if I was the Bush people on all this 11-point lead talk. It sounds great and they needed some good news. But beware a Labor Day lead. I went back and looked at the last three campaigns that have been this close, and in two out of the three, the candidate trailing on Labor Day ended up winning the election, the most recent example being George Bush himself. We were talking four years ago about the invincible Al Gore right now coming out of his convention” (“Countdown,” MSNBC, 9/6).

Oh, right… An 11-point lead is bad news. Check. But, hey… Didn’t Gore actually win the popular vote in the last election? I seem to remember reading something about that in the Times. And doesn’t that change the outcome of the scientific “best-out-of-three” study? Probably.

Nice try.