Alex Altman

The keys to Tuesday's Senate elections, according to the two parties' top strategists

Millions of votes have been cast, the last ads have been cut, and there’s barely a household that remains blessedly untouched by the fight for the U.S. Senate. At some point, there is nothing left to do but wait. So with Election Night days away, the two parties’ top Senate strategists gathered Thursday in Washington to preview the drama that will unfold.

Much of the sparring between Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Guy Cecil, his counterpart at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, involved the ritual scramble to manage expectations. (Yes, we know both sides are optimistic about their chances—at least publicly, anyway.) But some big-picture themes emerged from the spin session between two parties’ top strategists. Here are four takeaways:

A tale of two frames

If Republicans retake the Senate, they have Barack Obama to thank. The GOP’s strategy in the battleground states was to make each election a referendum on the President, tying vulnerable Democratic incumbents to the policies of a chief executive whose approval ratings have sagged into the low 40s. “We have framed it through the prism of a group of incumbents voting with the President more than 90% of the time,” Collins said.

In contrast, Democrats have sought to localize these races, framing the contests as a choice between two candidates. “It’s clear the Republicans want to nationalize” the elections, Cecil said. “And it’s clear the Democrats want to make it about the two people on the ballot.”

Candidates matter

Inside the party committees and out, Republicans are gushing about their slate of Senate candidates this cycle. For the first time since 2008, no incumbent GOP Senator was toppled in a primary this year. That means no Todd Akins, no Sharron Angles—no challengers whose verbal missteps or outré positions dented party candidates up and down the ballot. “This is the best recruiting class in 30 years,” Collins said. Democrats are enthused by some of their recruits as well, especially Georgia’s Michelle Nunn, whom Cecil cited as the cycle’s best candidate.

And then there are the duds. Cecil called Nunn’s opponent, Republican businessman David Perdue, perhaps this year’s worst Republican candidate. Perdue’s competition for the ignominious title is Sen. Pat Roberts, the three-term GOP incumbent whose listless campaign cracked open the door for an unknown independent in blood-red Kansas. As for weak Democrats, Collins cited North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan as a candidate whose shortcomings were “hidden behind a big pile of money.”

The bellwethers say plenty about each side’s path to victory

On Election Night, Collins said, the GOP will be looking at North Carolina and New Hampshire as harbingers. Both are close states where the Democratic incumbents—Hagan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, respectively—have led the whole way, only to see Republican challengers surge at the finish line. In contrast, Democrats are watching states like Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and Georgia. Democrats are even or behind in all of those contests, and just one—the Peach State—is a pickup opportunity for the President’s party. The bellwethers underscore just how much the map favors the GOP this year.

The money involved is massive

The two parties and their allied outside groups have carpet-bombed North Carolina, forking over more than $100 million on the Tar Heel State’s Senate contest. More than $55 million has been dropped on Alaska, a staggering sum in a state with cheap media markets and just 735,000 residents. And if Louisiana and Georgia go to runoffs? Expect the two sides to shell out another $35 million to $45 million apiece, Cecil predicted, if control of the Senate hangs in the balance. The DSCC has already reserved $10 million in television time in Louisiana. Which means the ad blitz may not let up until January after all.

Reformers urge the president to sign an expansive order allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S.

Immigration activists are ratcheting up the pressure on Barack Obama, warning the President that a failure to live up to expectations for executive action on immigration would jeopardize his party’s standing with the Hispanic community.

“We won’t take any more excuses,” says Cristina Jimenez of the immigration-reform group United We Dream. “What we expect from the President is for him to use his legal authority to enact a program that will protect as many people from our community as possible.”

Obama pledged over the summer to take executive action this fall on immigration in the absence of legislation to fix a broken system. That promise crumbled under political pressures, as vulnerable Democrats in red states cajoled the White House into postponing the move until after Nov. 4. Now, as the midterms draw near, some reformers fear they’re about to be brushed off once more.

As the White House begins to weigh the scope of executive action, the early whispers among immigration reformers are that Obama may fall short of the lofty targets the movement has set for him. The President is considering an order that would grant temporary protection from deportation and work authorization to a sizable number of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., a step he could take unilaterally by expanding the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The overarching question is how many undocumented immigrants he will protect. The White House signaled over the summer that it could extend administrative relief for up to several million undocumented immigrants and their families. By delaying the decision for political reasons, Obama has nudged expectations even higher.

At a “bare minimum,” said Pablo Alvarado, executive director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the immigration orders should include “an extension of work authorization to everyone who would qualify under the Senate bill and an end to the Secure Communities program and policies that criminalize immigrants. The President has the legal authority, the moral obligation, and the political capital required to take these important steps.” The Senate bill, which passed the upper chamber in June 2013 with 68 votes, would provide relief to some 8 million undocumented immigrants.

“This is an action that frankly we believe the President should have taken months ago,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “The president has broad legal authority to do this. It’s really about his political will.”

But there is growing concern that Obama may lack the will to make a bold unilateral move, especially if his party suffers sweeping losses in elections that were, in many ways, a referendum on his policies. Two anonymous sources cited by Buzzfeed, which reported Tuesday that final recommendations were being sent to Obama, pegged the number in the low seven figures. And even some of Obama’s allies worry that a President with a mixed record on immigration and an instinct for the middle ground will disappoint the Hispanic community once again.

“We’re definitely concerned,” says a Democratic source involved with the immigration-reform push, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the White House. “The history of this presidency is one of trying to accommodate the opposition.”

Timing is a mystery as well. The White House continues to say that Obama will act this year. But some in the immigration-reform movement worry the deadline could push once again. On Nov. 9, Obama leaves for a weeklong trip to Asia. The Thanksgiving lull arrives soon after. Then Congress needs to hammer out a deal to extend government funding, which expires in mid-December, amid a crammed lame-duck calendar. Executive action on immigration could throw a wrench in those budget talks.

Immigration reformers urged Obama to withstand those pressures. “Some might worry the backlash against a bold program will be too great,” said Hincapié. But that backlash will exist whether the President extends relief to one person, 1 million or many more. “We’re holding the president to his word,” she added. “There are no more excuses.”

Embattled chief Tom Jackson says he isn't going anywhere

The Ferguson, Mo. police department is denying reports that its chief is set to be replaced amid ongoing protests in a community bracing for a grand jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

“Nobody in my chain of command has asked me to resign, nor have I been terminated,” Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson told CNN, which reported late Tuesday night that Jackson would step down as part of a broad reorganization that would hand control of the department to the St. Louis County police. CNN, citing unnamed “government officials familiar with the ongoing discussions,” reported the move could come as soon as next week.

That was news to the Ferguson police department, which denied the report but left open the possibility that Jackson could vacate the post. “He has not been told to resign. He has not been fired. If he leaves, it will be his choice alone,” the department posted on Twitter.

Jackson did not immediately return a call or an email seeking comment on the report.

Officer Brian Schellman of the St. Louis County Police says his department is unaware of impending changes. “We have no knowledge of any of that,” Schellman says.

The report comes as the aftershocks of the Aug. 9 shooting continue to reverberate in the St. Louis suburb. A grand jury investigating the shooting of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, is expected to hand down a decision by mid-November on whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson on murder or manslaughter charges. In recent weeks, the protests have regained steam amid a series of leaked reports that appeared to corroborate Wilson’s claim that the shooting came after Brown assaulted the officer. Local officials say they are worried about the protests that may erupt if Wilson is not indicted.

Jackson has come under withering criticism for his handling of the shooting. As riots roiled the St. Louis suburb in the days after Brown’s death, Jackson resisted the intense pressure to identify the officer who shot him. When he finally fingered Wilson six days later, he did so while releasing a video of an unrelated robbery Brown committed before the attack—which critics considered an attempt to taint the reputation of the dead teen.

The shooting released a wave of mounting frustration between Ferguson’s largely African American population and its heavily white government and police force. Residents have raised questions about what they say is a pattern of racial profiling and the Justice Department has opened a broad civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department. Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited the troubled city in the aftermath of the shooting, has said his department is investigating the Ferguson force’s record of stops, searches and use of force against residents. Statistics indicate the police force has targeted African Americans at a disproportionate rate.

His attempt to force a nurse to stay under a 21-day quarantine didn't work out as expected

Quarantine decision prioritizes politics over policy

The decision to impose a mandatory quarantine in New York and New Jersey for health care workers arriving from Ebola-stricken nations has opened a rift between the Obama Administration and the governors of those states.

Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York on Friday ordered doctors and nurses returning to be isolated for 21 days, the incubation period for the lethal pathogen that has killed nearly 5,000 in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That was just a day after New York City physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been volunteering at a Doctors Without Borders clinic for Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with the virus. He is in isolation at a Manhattan hospital. The first health worker quarantined under the new provision was the nurse Kaci Hickox, who landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday and is being monitored at a Newark Hospital. She has tested negative for Ebola.

To the White House, the governors’ decision represents politics trumping public-health policy. With voters spooked by the specter of Ebola and supportive of tougher measures to prevent its spread, Cuomo and Christie say they are trying to assuage panic and protect the citizens of their states. But health officials say that health care workers who follow federal guidelines pose no threat to the public. And they worry that a mandatory quarantine will dissuade desperately needed medical personnel from volunteering to battle the virus at the source of the epidemic in West Africa.

The dispute simmered over the weekend, as Administration officials pressed the states to reverse the decision. “We have let the governors of New York, New Jersey, and others states know that we have concerns with the unintended consequences of policies not grounded in science may have on efforts to combat Ebola at its source in West Africa,” a senior Administration official tells TIME.

Christie and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sparred over the policy on Fox News Sunday. Fauci, a top federal health official, defended the government’s existing protective protocols and argued that a forced quarantine for health care workers who pose a “vanishingly small” risk of transmitting the virus could be a disincentive to volunteers.

“The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those health care workers. So, we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very uncomfortable for them to even volunteer to go,” Fauci said. “If we don’t have our people volunteering to go over there, then you’re going to have other countries that are not going to do it, and then the epidemic will continue to roar.”

But for the governors, science may be secondary to politics. Polls show that many voters, in the grips of Ebola panic, favor measures to restrict the possible spread of Ebola, even those — like a ban on travel to and from virus-stricken nations — that medical experts say would make things worse.

As a result, Christie and Cuomo stand to benefit from going beyond the safety guidelines set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So does Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, an embattled Democrat embroiled in a tough re-election fight, who also ordered a mandatory quarantine of health workers flying into that state.

Like Quinn, Cuomo is up for re-election on Nov. 4. His Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, has sought to harness the panic to gain ground, pummeling Cuomo’s preparation for the virus as “gross negligence.”

Christie is positioning himself for a possible White House run next year, and his advisers believe that his confrontational style of crisis management underscores his appeal to voters. Picking a fight with the feds over Ebola, even when the science doesn’t support his position, may be a way to resurrect the tactics that earned him bipartisan plaudits after Hurricane Sandy.

Appearing on the same program as Fauci, Christie defended the mandatory quarantine. “I don’t believe when you’re dealing with something as serious as this that we can count on a voluntary system,” he said. “The government’s job is to protect the safety and health of our citizens.”

Hickox, the nurse quarantined in New Jersey, wrote an essay for the Dallas Morning News on Saturday that slammed the decision. “We need more health care workers to help fight the epidemic in West Africa,” she wrote. “The U.S. must treat returning health care workers with dignity and humanity.” She has hired a lawyer, who has been cleared to visit her in the hospital. The American Civil Liberties Union has also inquired about the state’s legal right to quarantine her given her negative Ebola diagnosis.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio called the way that Hickox has been treated “inappropriate.”

— With reporting by Zeke J. Miller

Says thousands needed to stop the spread of Ebola

The global health community needs “thousands” more health-care workers in West Africa to tame the Ebola virus epidemic that has so far killed nearly 5,000 people, the president of the World Bank told reporters Friday.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, chief of the international financial institution, said a lack of trained medical personnel in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is one of the main challenges hampering the international effort to control an outbreak that has ravaged three West African countries and risks spreading to its neighbors.

Kim said the global community has stepped up its response to Ebola, but conceded that the World Bank, like other international organizations, was late to recognize the severity of the epidemic. The spread of the virus in the three stricken nations at the heart of the epidemic has left healthcare workers in triage mode. As a result, they are often unable to use “the ideal techniques” for combating an epidemic, such as contact tracing—the process of identifying and isolating the contacts of infected patients.

“We are now on a war footing,” Kim said, “but it took us a long time to get there.”

Kim said that international organizations have ratcheted up levels of support to West Africa after a sluggish start, but said more must be done. “We’ve got to get beyond these sort of nihilists notions that nothing can be done,” he said. The World Bank has pumped $400 million into West Africa to fight Ebola.

Kim praised Dr. Craig Spencer, the physician who was diagnosed with Ebola Thursday night in New York City. Spencer contracted the virus while treating Ebola patients in Guinea as a volunteer for the international organization Doctors Without Borders, or Medicins Sans Frontieres.

“Dr. Spencer is a hero,” Kim said, urging more doctors to follow his lead and fight the epidemic at its source. He added that both the patient and city officials executed a textbook response to Spencer’s symptoms.

Kim said he hoped that the cases in Dallas and New York would help open the eyes of the world to a disease gutting large swaths of West Africa and prompt the global community to spring into action more quickly in the future. “I think this is a wakeup call,” he said, pausing slightly. “I hope this is a wakeup call.”

A guide to the latest news from the Ferguson case and grand jury investigation

As a St. Louis County grand jury weighs whether to indict Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a series of leaks have provided new information about the skirmish that led to Brown’s death and ignited a national debate about race and police violence. A lot has happened since Brown died after a confrontation with Wilson on Aug. 9. Here’s a guide to making sense of it:

What’s new?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch obtained Brown’s official autopsy report on Oct. 22, which indicates he was shot near the right thumb at very close range. Medical experts interviewed by the paper said the findings may support Wilson’s contention that Brown was reaching for the officer’s gun inside the police SUV where their original struggle occurred. A separate autopsy conducted for Brown’s family by Dr. Michael Baden, a well-known forensic pathologist, concluded that none of the teen’s wounds indicated he was shot at such close range.

Wilson told investigators that Brown punched him in the face through the open window of the vehicle, according to the Post-Dispatch. In Wilson’s version of events, the punch prompted him to draw his gun and Brown grabbed for it. As they struggled over the weapon, Brown was shot in the hand. According to Wilson, Brown then ran away from the vehicle, so the officer jumped out to give chase. Wilson reportedly told investigators that Brown defied the officer’s command to stop, then turned and ran at him, at which point Wilson fired the fatal shots.

According to the Washington Post, “a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses” have provided testimony to the grand jury that supports Wilson’s version of events. Brown’s blood was found on the gun, on Wilson’s uniform and spattered on an inside door panel of the car, according to the New York Times. Other witnesses have provided divergent accounts of the incident, alleging that Brown was shot with his hands in the air or while fleeing. Protesters pictured with their hands-up became one of the iconic images of the unrest that wracked Ferguson in the weeks after Brown’s death.

What’s not?

In many ways, the leaks amplify what we already knew. From the beginning, the Ferguson police department has said publicly that Wilson shot Brown after the teen instigated a struggle in the SUV that made the officer fear for his safety. Independent witnesses have said there was a scuffle, though they differ on whether it happened in or near Wilson’s vehicle. Apart from detailed forensic information about Brown’s wounds, the autopsy includes a toxicology report indicating the presence of marijuana in Brown’s system. Previously released surveillance video shows Brown stealing a pack of Swisher Sweets, cheap cigars that are commonly used to roll blunts, from a convenience store shortly before the altercation with Wilson. But that incident had nothing to do with the confrontation, which occurred after Wilson ordered Brown and a friend to move onto the sidewalk as they walked down the middle of a street.

How important is this information?

The details of the struggle in the SUV matter. In Missouri, as elsewhere, a police officer has wide latitude to use deadly force if he has justifiable reason to feel his life is in danger. If forensic information and witness testimony support Wilson’s account that Brown grabbed for his gun, the grand jury—or, in the event of an indictment, a trial jury—would ostensibly be more likely to determine that the use of force was justified.

What don’t the leaks tell us?

They don’t explain the origin of the skirmish, which seems to have escalated abruptly. In describing the toxicology report, the Post’s sources say “the levels in Brown’s body may have been high enough to trigger hallucinations,” but there is no scientific link between marijuana and violent behavior.

Most importantly, the leaks do not provide new forensic information about the sequence of fatal shots. “What we want to know is why Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times and killed him even though he was more than 20 feet away from his patrol car,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. “This is the crux of the matter!” The autopsy does not offer any answers.

What’s going on with the grand jury?

Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, has said that he expects the deliberations to wrap up this month or next. The grand jury process has been unusual in a number of ways, as TIME reported last month.

Prosecutors declined to recommend a specific charge for Wilson, which is rare. Instead, they are presenting evidence as it becomes available, and allowing the grand jury members to determine whether it warrants charges of murder or manslaughter. (There are two options for each charge: first- or second-degree murder; and voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.)

All testimony in the case is being transcribed, which is unusual because it exposes witnesses to future legal proceedings. McCulloch has delegated the task of presenting evidence to two attorneys in his office in an attempt to neutralize allegations that he lacks objectivity. (McCulloch’s father, a police officer, died in the line of duty, and African Americans have criticized his handling of past police shootings.) In another rare move, McCulloch has pledged to immediately release transcripts of the proceedings. According to the prosecutor’s office, these decisions were made in the interest of transparency, though it may also be an attempt to head off criticism in the event that the grand jury declines to indict Wilson.

Is there a motive for the leaks?

It’s a criminal act to leak information about grand jury proceedings, so the number of leaks the investigation has sprung in recent days is conspicuous. The Department of Justice, which is conducting its own inquiry into the shooting, has condemned the trickle of information.“There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case,” it said on Oct. 22.

The leaks have also raised questions about whether sources connected to the investigation are spreading this information to prepare the community for the possibility that the grand jury declines to indict. The information that has leaked suggests the likelihood of that may be greater than protesters realize.

How is Ferguson reacting?

The daily demonstrations are ongoing. Protests tapered off in the weeks after Brown’s death, but the Oct. 8 killing of Vonderrit Myers, a black 18-year-old shot by an off-duty St. Louis police officer, rekindled the community’s fury. (Cops say Myers fired at the officer first; forensic evidence released by the police department, including lab results that reportedly show gunpowder residue on Myers’ hand and in the waistband of his jeans, appear to corroborate that version of events. Myers’ family says they believe he was unarmed.)

Thousands of people massed in St. Louis in mid-October for coordinated protests following Myers’ death. There were some arrests and sporadic clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement, but nothing on the scale of the August riots. But it was enough to upset the fragile peace that had set in during September and on Oct. 21, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced the formation of a commission to address issues like race relations.

The recent autopsy and other leaks have fanned the flames in Ferguson. That anger is likely a mere preview of how the community will react if Wilson is cleared. “If there is no indictment,” said one protester, “all hell is going to break loose.”

Read next: Mourning Ferguson

Officials are weighing the possibility in the wake of failures in Dallas, but there is only room for 19 patients

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola case diagnosed in the U.S., was a warning to hospitals that a patient infected with the deadly virus could walk into their emergency room at any time. Hospitals from New York City to Seattle are now running Ebola drills, testing their staffs to ensure they are prepared to diagnose the disease without putting healthcare workers at risk of contracting it.

“Every hospital in the country needs to be ready to diagnose Ebola,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The question is whether every hospital is equipped to care for a patient who tests positive for the disease, which has killed nearly 4,500 people in West Africa. During this outbreak, the most deadly since the disease was first discovered in 1976, the mortality rate is about 70%, according to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization. Health care workers are at particular risk for infection, which is transmitted through contact with a symptomatic patient’s bodily fluids, like blood or vomit.

Those risks have been born out in Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where Duncan was admitted on Sept. 28 and died on Oct. 8. Early Wednesday, the hospital said a second healthcare worker who administered care to Duncan had tested positive for the disease. The hospital’s stumbles have prompted critics to question whether the additional infections were avoidable—and whether future patients should be cared for at specialized hospitals with the expertise and facilities to treat Ebola cases.

Frieden said Tuesday that the second healthcare worker would be transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, which has a specialized isolation unit for treating diseases like Ebola and has successfully cared for patients with the virus in the past.

Some doctors say moving future Ebola patients to specialized hospitals makes sense. “Given some of the complexities, patients who have this disease are probably best cared for by those who have experience caring for it, and whose healthcare workers are highly trained and drilled in self-protection,” says Dr. Gabe Kelen, the director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response. “It’s not appropriate to think that each and every hospital in the country could bring the resources, the intense training for the healthcare workers that is required.”

There are four hospitals in the U.S. with special isolation units designed to contain biohazards like Ebola. In addition to Emory, they are the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, in Bethesda, Md., a hospital at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mt. The facilities in Atlanta and Omaha have successfully treated Americans infected with Ebola overseas without any healthcare workers contracting the virus.

Though transporting future cases to these facilities may be prudent, they have limited beds: only 19 between them, according to CNN. Exclusively using specialized hospitals to treat Ebola is only an option so long as the number of cases in the U.S. remains extremely low.

A CDC spokesman said the agency may announce further measures for Ebola on Wednesday.

-Additional reporting by Zeke J. Miller

Could a second upset be brewing on the prairie?

If Democrats hold the Senate in November, it could be due to surprising success in states the party never expected to be competitive.

Just weeks after independent candidate Greg Orman surged in a Kansas Senate race that had been chalked into the Republican column, Democrats have spied another unlikely opening on the prairie. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) on Wednesday pumped $1 million into the surprisingly competitive South Dakota Senate race.

The DSCC poured in the cash just hours after a new poll showed Republican Mike Rounds locked in a three-way contest with independent candidate Larry Pressler and Democrat Rick Weiland. The SurveyUSA poll released Wednesday showed Rounds with 35%, Pressler with 32% and Weiland with 28%. The race also includes a Tea Party candidate who could siphon votes from the GOP frontrunner.

The survey could be an outlier. Rounds still boasts an average 12-point lead in recent polling, and South Dakota is a conservative state. “If I was a betting man, I would still put money on Rounds,” says Bob Burns, a veteran political analyst in the state.

But the DSCC’s move, first reported by Bloomberg Politics, underlines the dramatic changes in a race that both sides had written off as a cakewalk. Even this summer, as Democrats desperately searched for ways to hold their majority together, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was frank about the party’s chance in South Dakota. “We are going to lose,” the Nevada Democrat said.

But as in neighboring Kansas, something strange is happening in South Dakota. Rounds, a former governor, has been dogged by a controversy over the state’s EB-5 program, a federal visa program that grants green cards to wealthy immigrants who invest at least $500,000 in economic development project. As governor, Rounds was a booster of the program, which has drawn criticism for mismanagement and lack of transparency after it was privatized by one of the governor’s allies.

Democrats believe the issue may have made Rounds vulnerable. The Republican’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Democratic money will go toward field operations and ads attacking Rounds. In a sign of how strange the three-way entanglement is becoming, Mayday PAC, the quixotic super PAC whose stated goal is to reverse the tide of big-money politics, has dumped $1 million into the race in support of Weiland, whom not even Reid is supporting. Meanwhile, the wild card is Pressler, 72, a three-term former U.S. senator who represented the state as a Republican from 1979 through 1996.

Nearly 20 years later, after stints as a college professor in the U.S., Italy and France, Pressler has launched the kind of quixotic campaign that is typically run by quirky obsessives, not former senators. He has one paid staffer, slaps together homemade yard signs with magic markers, and relies on his wife as his driver when he barnstorms the state. When he returned a reporter’s call himself Wednesday, he had just been informed that his campaign website did not include a mailing address for supporters to send in contributions.

“It’s bare bones,” he says. “My wife was very doubtful.”

In part that’s because of his fundraising deficit. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, Pressler has spent just $50,000, a sum dwarfed by Rounds’ $3 million. “I’m like a sitting duck with no clothes on out on the firing range,” he says. “We won’t be able to answer any negative ads.”

Pressler says he hasn’t decided which party he would caucus with if elected. But with the GOP’s lurch to the right, the former moderate Republican now sounds more like a Democrat. He voted for Barack Obama. He supports balancing the budget in part by raising taxes on millionaires, a new gas tax and the elimination of some corporate deductions. He wants to raise the minimum wage and teacher salaries, supports gay marriage, and says the U.S. should pare back its military spending. “I’m not an isolationist,” he adds. “I know we have to do some bombing.”

Pressler says he will limit himself to a “one glorious term” if elected, freeing him from the demands of the contemporary senatorial practice of dialing for dollars. Though his shoestring campaign may still be a long shot, Pressler says the moment is right for a post-partisan candidate. “We’ve seeing something very significant happening in American politics,” he says.

At the very least, something strange is stirring out on the prairie.

-Additional reporting by Alex Rogers