National news media taking a final look at the race; Kentucky campuses holding mock election

A rolling roundup as we head into the final weekend . . .

• "Kentucky's Senate race, one of the most closely watched in the country, boils down to which Washington insider is worse in the eyes of voters:" Sen. Mitch McConnell or President Obama, writes Francine Kiefer of The Christian Science Monitor. Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, summed it up for Kiefer this way: "We have an unpopular senator who leads the resistance against an unpopular president."
• "McConnell’s path to victory runs through the hilly coal fields [sic] in the east, the buzzing sheet metal factories along the state’s southern tier and in the barns leaking with pouring rain in the flat and cow-spotted western farmland," Jason Horowitz of The New York Times writes after traveling with McConnell through those areas. "At the end of his 14 campaign rallies and hundreds of miles lined with falling orange and ocher autumn leaves, Mr. McConnell seemed to have reached a better, less anxious, place."
• McConnell seems to be a little looser than usual as the race comes to a close. He told 85 business and political leaders at a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce meeting, "The American people have seemed to reach the conclusion they have had enough of this crap," meaning "six years of Democratic control of both the presidency and the Senate," reports Amanda Van Benschoten of The Kentucky Enquirer.
• The Kentucky Campus Compact, comprising colleges and universities in the state, is holding a mock election online. The site also has links to overviews of the race, a voters' guide, the KET debate, a debate fact check, this blog and information about voting, campaign finance and polling places. The site is co-sponsored by the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement at Northern Kentucky University, the Campus Election Engagement Project and the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro.