SurveyUSA polled 562 likely voters in Washington's third district and look what they found: Jaime Herrera leads Denny Heck 54/41 among likely voters, with 5 percent undecided. Good news for Washington Republicans, all around.

Or is it?

Among friends who scrutinize polling rigorously, I've heard some questions raised lately about why SurveyUSA's numbers seem more Republican-favorable than those from other polls this cycle.

Do their determinations as to who qualifies as a "likely voter" in 2010 indicate a better screening process given the overall environment?

Or are they screening out people who will ultimately vote Democratic, no matter what they're saying now?

Is their methodology appropriate for Washington, a state that is almost 100 percent vote-by-mail, making voting a relatively painless, low-effort exercise that less fired-up voters may ultimately participate in despite low enthusiasm because, well, the ballot is sitting on the kitchen table, so why not?

Or does the vote-by-mail situation actually guarantee Republicans an edge: Voters favoring Republicans have an easy route to voting for them, and given general unhappiness with leadership in Washington, DC, they'll go ahead and tick the "R" box, just because it's so easy?...

Marc Ambinder has the news:

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," Mehlman said. "Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."

Go read the whole thing.

Already, notorious gay-Republican-outer (and life-destroyer) Mike Rogers is out there trashing Mehlman. Other gay liberals are doing the same....

SurveyUSA did some polling in the aftermath of the Washington primary last week, and looky here at what they found. Statewide, among likely voters, Rossi leads Murray 52 to 45 percent. But more interestingly, in metropolitan Seattle, Rossi ties Murray with 48 percent.

Last week, I pointed out that Murray's approval numbers, according to SurveyUSA, were in the toilet, both statewide and in metropolitan Seattle, where a gigantic glut of liberal voters live. Just 41 percent of adults approved of her performance across the state; in metropolitan Seattle, it was just 43 percent.

These most recent numbers certainly seem to indicate some further, real challenges for Murray as she heads towards Election Day, though it does bear noting that as we've seen with California (reminder: I consult for Carly Fiorina in the Senate race there), SurveyUSA's numbers tell a different tale from other polling outfits.

Their methodology could be producing a different (and erroneous) result here.

Or, they could be dead-on in their assessment, which seems to lend credence to anecdotal evidence I am constantly, and nearly universally, hearing out of Washington, from folks on both sides of the aisle: Democratic, non-union base voters are demoralized; Republicans (and Republican-leaning Independents and Democrats) are energized.

While I haven't seen much private polling of the race for a couple of months now, on the basis of what I have seen previously, and this, and the Murray versus Republican share of the vote as evidenced in last week's primary, my instinct is to think Murray and Rossi remain just about evenly matched, but that Rossi is just every-so-slightly ahead of her and could win this by a nose (to borrow some horseracing terminology)....