by Ana Marie Cox

How long is "an eternity in politics"? According to news coverage of these midterms, it's anywhere from "five weeks" to "overnight" with stops along the way at "thirty days," "thirteen days" and "a week." Most of these confident mismeasurements of time came from Republicans, eager to remind critics and reporters that however bleak their future looks now, they have some negative ads still left run and, to rack up another hoary cliche, "the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day." (I think Gallup does it.)

There's one slice of that eternity that has a very specific length: "The 72 Hour Project." Perhaps you've heard of it. The GOP's finely-honed strategy for turning out its core constituency has become the favored talking point for party hacks and journalists alike, to the extent there is a difference. The Republicans talk it up in order to give some semblance of justification for the confidence displayed by party leaders. For the Democrats, it's a mantra to prevent excessively early drape purchases. The press, on the other hand, invokes it like a sports announcer begging an audience not to change the channel during a blow-out game.

The ostensible point of debate is whether the 72-hour strategy will work (fueled by rumors of low enthusiasm among conservatives) but the debate might turn into how much GOTV (as "get out the vote" is know in acronym-happy punditopolis) will really matter. This cycle has seen an unprecedented number of absentee ballots requested and cast, mostly due to states eliminating the requirement that voters have a reason to vote absentee. In Montana, where Democrat John Tester has been trying to eke out a Senate victory against incumbent Republican Conrad Burns, nearly one out of six voters have requested absentee ballots. Polls have shown Burns pulling closer to Tester, a phenomenon some explain by saying Burns has been performing better lately (or at least not screwing up as much), but half of those absentee ballots have been cast, presumably back when Burns was still talking about his "little Guatamalan man" and taxi-driving terrorists. The same trend holds true in other states: In Maryland, voter concerns about new polling procedures (procedures that wrecked havoc during the primary elections) have spurred a push for absentee ballots as well. More than 152,000 have been ordered, about ten thousand more than were cast in the 2004 presidential election. How much will Republican Senate candidate's Michael Steele's appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday matter to the voters who just remember him as a Bush shill? Similar trends across the country (in Iowa, Democrat absentee ballots have come in at a rate of two-to-one) suggest that Republican fears about voters not going to the polls are accurate but misdirected: Clearly, a significant proportion of the base will not be showing up Nov. 8, but it's the Democratic base and it's only because they already voted.

Conservative pundits have not quite appropriated absentee ballots as a talking point, though John Fund may have given a preview of post-election spin with his Wall Street Journal column today. Without going into specifics about how absentee ballots tend to favor Democrats, he warns darkly about their dangers. "It's so easy to cheat you'd be surprised who's been caught at it," he says, and absentee voting "corrupts the secret ballot." As if that weren't bad enough, they fail to "[f]oster the communal aspect of citizens voting together." (Is that what's supposed to make up for the way that campaigning tears us apart?) Anyway, if it's true that in this election cycle, Republicans have been acting like Democrats, absentee ballots are the new Diebold.

And, obviously, they completely mess with how long an eternity is. But Republicans have been having some trouble with temporal relations for quite some time -- just look at how long we've been in Iraq, where, I'm sure, a week really does feel like an eternity.