The Romney campaign is getting weird in these final days

Am I the only person to notice that Team Romney is acting in an unfathomable fashion as election day approaches? Money should be tight right now, yet the Romneyites (as detailed two posts down) are making huge ad buys in states "not in play" -- Texas, for example.

And I keep seeing Romney ads all over liberal sites, such as Op Ed News and BooMan. What can Mitt hope to gain from such expenditures?

We're also seeing a flurry of strange polls. Usually, even the partisan polls head toward realism in the final days -- that's how a firm like Rasmussen can make claims of accuracy. But this cycle is different.

In Pennsylvania, where Mitt is spending heavily, one poll has the race a tie -- even though all other polls show Obama ahead by a fairly comfortable margin. The outlier poll was conducted by a Scaife-owned newspaper.

Michigan has been safely in the Obama column for some time, yet a new Fox-sponsored poll puts Romney slightly ahead in that state. 

Then there's Minnesota, where Romney leads by one point in a poll conducted for the GOP by the American Future Fund. All other polls (even Rasmussen's!) paint Garrison Keillor's home state a fairly deep blue -- downright cerulean, by some measures. 

If -- fairly or otherwise -- PA, MN and MI go red, then Ohio (probably) won't matter.

One possibility is that these questionable late-in-the-game polls are meant to give credibility to election machine rigging. This blog will have much more to say about that possibility very soon. For now, see Brad Friedman's coverage, along with Victoria Collier's work. (Also here.) The hysterical right-wing attacks on Nate Silver may also figure into this scenario.