The presidential matchups continue and Gov. Tim Pawlenty continues to be a drag on the Republican ticket. The SurveyUSA polling firm continues its state-by-state march across America, this time focusing the relative strenghs of John McCain and Barack Obama when matched with a variety of running mates.

In the absolute battleground of Ohio, Pawlenty’s presence on the ticket results in a GOP loss of between 5 and 18 percentage points. And in Iowa, a state nearly as important in November, the governor of a next-door state (ouch) fares as poorly as 26 percentage pointsbehind Obama and John Edwards.

Full results here.

On the bright side for Pawlentyites, New York Times columnists had some ear-burningly nice things to say about their guy today, calling him in passing a “shining star:”

McCain will need somebody who radiates calm. He’ll need somebody who can provide structure and organization. He’ll need somebody who enjoys working with budgets…

Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, is one of the G.O.P.’s leading and most likable modernizers. The son of a truck driver (his mother died when he was 16), he is the godfather of Sam’s Club conservatism, the effort to reconnect the party to the needs of the working class. Pawlenty could help McCain play the Theodore Roosevelt-style role — reforming the nation’s institutions to fit a new century and epoch.

The folks at SurveyUSA continue to roll out state-by-state test heats, with possible vice-presidential running mates grafted onto John McCain and Barack Obama (see the 5/20 post below for a longer expplanation).

For champions of a Tim Pawlenty pick by McCain, the short version is this: Bad news, governor.

In Virginia, where Obama runs 7 percentage points ahead of McCain without running mates, Pawlenty drags the GOP ticket to within a single point. In Ohio, his strongest showing is a 5-point loss — and he turns out the worst performance by far, with McCain-Pawlenty losing to Obama and John Edwards by 18 percentage points.

Here’s the link for complete results.

Barely 12 hours before word began leaking out that John Edwards would fold his presidential campaign this afternoon, he sat in a meeting room at a St. Paul union hall and denied — repeatedly — he planned to do any such thing.

Edwards last night, firing up his troops

Edwards was reacting to the non-stop speculation in recent days that his lackluster showings in the first four Democratic contests would force him to bow out, shortly after his campaign announced that he was canceling appearances today in North Dakota and Alabama. Instead, he was headed for New Orleans, where he launched his campaign more than a year ago, to give a major speech on poverty.

At one point in a brief interview, he dismissed the buzz about him dropping out as “nonsense”

And in a full-throated speech to hundreds of fired-up union members, he left them with the clear impression he was in the race for the long haul.

Click here to hear what the former North Carolina senator had to say last night about quitting his second bid for the presidency:

Another week, another Democratic presidential debate (this one out of Philadelphia tonight, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on MSNBC and streaming live on msnbc.com), but this one carries with it expectations that it could be a steel-cage match between frontrunner Hillary Clinton and newly-agressive, second-place Barack Obama.

The stage will be as crowded as it has been for all of the earlier debates, but it’s almost certain that nearly all of the attention will be focused on the candidate who would become the first female president (with her towering — and growing – lead in the polls) and the candidate who would become the first black president (who signalled over the weekend that his gloves would come off; asked if Clinton had been truthful in what she’d been telling voters, he replied, simply, “no.”)

Adding to the intrigue are new poll numbers out of Iowa, the only place where Clinton doesn’t appear to have built a towering lead. A new Hawkeye Poll conducted by the University of Iowa shows a dead heat between Clinton and Obama, with John Edwards tailing off in the state that has become his make-or-break stand. Here are the details about the poll.

Here’s a taste of how the Obama and Clinton camps have been sniping at each other. Obama went first over the weekend, with a new ad about Social Security that (again, implicitly) slams Clinton, saying “I don’t want to just put my finger out to the wind and see what the polls say.”

For its part, the Clinton campaign lobbed a news release over the transom this morning that picks apart Obama’s “politics of hope” riff. Accusing both Obama and Edwards for sullying the concept, it asks, rhetorically, “Does the “politics of hope” mean launching attacks on one candidate? Or does it mean laying out a vision for the American people? Does it mean questioning a rival’s integrity? Or does it mean talking about the change we need?”

Again, the fun starts at 8 p.m.

Everyone knows that Iowans take their presidential politics way more seriously than most Americans, but this is ridiculous.

The Des Moines Register, longtime depository of all things you could ever want to know about the Iowa caucuses, has performed a public service for readers who want to mingle their politics with Halloween: “Carve a candidate” templates of the presidential candidates that can be used to carve a jack-o-lantern with the visage of, say, John McCain (who loves to say he’s got “more scars than Frankenstein”).

Alas, the templates include only the six candidates at the front of the pack, so supporters of Dennis Kucinich and Tom Tancredo are out of luck.

(And who says newspapers no longer perform the vital civic function they once did?)

Now that the third-quarter presidential fundraising stats have been released by the Federal Election Commission, some interesting nuggets emerged about contributors from Minnesota, beyond the big-picture story of the money race.

That sound you hear is the ground shifting ever more decidedly toward the inevitability of Hillary Clinton becoming the Dems’ presidential nominee. Although the punditocracy has been declaring that her prospects for overwhelming the field have been growing for weeks, that was always accompanied by a “yes, but …” The “but” here has been the fact that the opening round in Iowa remained very much a three-candidate race, too close to call among Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Then the Des Moines Register dropped this bombshell into the race on Sunday.

Suddenly, it was harder for Clinton’s opponents to wave away her big, consistent leads in national polls as irrelevant to the on-the-ground campaign in Iowa. They were reduced to invoking the political ghost of Howard Dean, who was leading in Iowa at this point during the 2004 election cycle.

And the fact remains that leading in the runup to the Iowa caucuses, or even winning them, is by no means a free ticket to the White House, much less the nomination. And a failure to win them isn’t necessarily a ticket to oblivion. After all, in 1972, George McGovern ran second in Iowa, as Jimmy Carter did four years later, which was considered a decisive step toward their winning the Democratic nomination (that’s the Iowa Expectations Game at work: Do better — or worse — than expected and it can totally scramble the significance of the subsequent primaries). And while George H.W. Bush thumped Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Republican caucuses, everyone remembers who ended up at the top of that particular ticket.

Back to this year, the expectations game could yet come back to bite Clinton, as David Yepsen, the Register’s legendary political columnist, explained after the poll numbers were published.

This week, forget for a moment the poll numbers and follow the dollar signs. Even before the third-quarter campaign fundraising deadline passed at midnight Sunday, the presidential campaigns were furiously spinning forward to put the best face on the size of the piles of cash they (and/or their rivals) were going to report to the Federal Election Commission.

On the Democratic side, both the Obama and Clinton campaigns were playing the reverse expectation game, each saying they expected to underperform their chief rival. It will be interesting to see if Hillary Clinton has, indeed, tapped out with her biggest donors as many analysts said after the second quarter ended. An equally intriguing question about Barack Obama: Was he able to continue his record-breaking fundraising pace during the past three months, a period when he plateaued in the polls? Rounding out the party’s top tier, was John Edwards’ announcement last week that he would accept an estimated $10 million in public financing an acknowledgment that his fundraising had stalled. And will any of the second-tier Democratic candidates get a lift from better-than-expected numbers.

As for the Republicans, this will be the first real test of Fred Thompson’s fundraising heft, since it’s the first quarter he’s actually been in the race. Although Mitt Romney had been the party’s top money-raiser during the first six months of the year, that was accomplished only through an infusion of millions of bucks from his own wallet. How will he and Rudy Giuliani fare? And John McCain is in the same boat as Edwards, expected to go to the public-financing well to replenish his less-than-steller fundraising.

If you’re not satisfied with the spin of the the pundits and campaign operatives on the current state of the money race, you can look at the raw figures yourself and poke around to your heart’s content here.

Update: For what it’s worth, Obama’s campaign was the first out of the e-mailbox at midday Monday, with these detailed bragging rights: Third quarter totals:• Primary dollars raised: at least $19 million