In preparation for last night’s call – great fun, by the way, and if you’re not calling in, you ought to – I called around to my Virginia sources, and what was interesting was how little they had to say about the governor’s race. The conventional wisdom, it seems, is that the drama is waning, and even liberal bloggers are starting to write as if the race is over.

Not Larry Sabato wrote that Creigh Deeds “is clearly completely lost with zero vision for what needs to happen to win this election” and predicted a Republican sweep of all statewide offices.

Jerome Armstrong, who worked for Brian Moran, who lost to Deeds in the primary, wrote after Monday night’s debate that “things are not hopeless, but its pretty close to it,” and he’s predicting “Republicans will sweep the statewide contests, pick up delegate seats.”

One of my guys who was most worried about GOP get-out-the-vote efforts said he was “much more optimistic. . . . it looks like everyone has learned the lessons of the last eight years.”

In fact, the big question on the Democratic side seems to be where to put their resources to mitigate the damage in a bad year. Local Republicans think that the national and state Democrats will now go all in for Steve Shannon, their candidate for attorney general, viewing that as their best opportunity. But others think they may have a slightly better chance in the lieutenant governor’s race, where Bill Bolling is running as an incumbent. (There’s less polling on these down-ticket races, but the Democrats are usually behind by 7 to 9 percentage points.) I find it interesting that they think they have their best shot against GOP attorney general candidate Ken Cuccinelli, since the consensus is that he probably has the best grassroots organization of any of the candidates.

My Virginia guys, along with just about everyone else, think a big McDonnell win will have some coattails. In 84 out of 100 state House districts this fall, there will be a Republican nominee on the ballot. That may not seem like much, but that’s 20 more than two years ago, and in fact is the party’s best year ever. The previous record was 81 nominees in 2001. Yesterday liberal blogger Not Larry Sabato put the range of Democratic losses from one to eleven; Virginia Republicans don’t want to set the limit, but would not be surprised to see three to six seats picked up.

Another one of my guys noted that the last top-of-the-ticket Republican to win statewide was George W. Bush in 2004, so while most might worry about complacency, the grassroots are eager and fired up after a long drought of victories. I’ve been told the McDonnell campaign will not be using any “prevent defense”; they think the difference between a win and a big win is maintaining a heavy drumbeat of good news – endorsements of small community organizations, small local papers, etc.

Virginia Republicans expect that President Obama will do a last-minute appearance to try to save face for Deeds, but going through the numbers, demographics, and profiles, a revealing point became clear: It would be hard to imagine a worse candidate to reassemble the Obama coalition than Creigh Deeds.