I know November 4th is a long way away

[TheCalvinator24]

Of course it's over. If you want change, why the hell would you vote for the party in power?

It ain't over until the Diebold voting machine sings... or until George W. Bush declares martial law, cancels the election, and declares himself king.

You really should take off the tinfoil hat.

[DadofTwins]

McCain can't win by recycling the old charges about Ayers, Wright, and Rezko, because the public has been willing to give a pass to Obama on them so far.

I've always thought that the Republicans have had more stuff about Obama that they haven't brought out yet. The change in McCain's and Palin's tactics the last couple of days bears this out. They've been hitting Obama hard on character and that's likely to continue during the debate tomorrow. This will get the public thinking at least on some level about Obama's character and background. I expect to see and hear something new shortly after that.

If there were something in Obama's past that could change this election, we would know about it by now because Hillary Clinton would have used it in the primaries.

State polls today tend to reflect what the national polls were last week. There's about a six-day delay. That said, if Obama wins only the states where the state polls give him an 80% chance or better of winning, he finishes with 286 electoral votes. Even if McCain somehow wins all of the toss-up states, he still loses the election. And it's going to take something bigger than a few bank failures to change that.

The only question left is margin of victory.

[NellyLunatic1980]

Of course it's over. If you want change, why the hell would you vote for the party in power?

It ain't over until the Diebold voting machine sings... or until George W. Bush declares martial law, cancels the election, and declares himself king.

You really should take off the tinfoil hat.

Yeah, the martial law joke was a little over the top... but don't sit there and think that the Bush Administration hasn't at least considered turning the U.S. executive branch into a dictatorship or monarchy. Bush himself said publicly several years ago that his job "would be a heck of a lot easier if this were a dictatorship, just so long as I'm the dictator".

As for the voting machines, I'm not really that worried about them this year, and here's why: The state-by-state polls indicate that this could be a possible landslide electoral victory for Sen. Obama. I'm talking victories in battleground states big enough such that no voting machine or secretary of state can possibly rig a McCain win out of them. I bet the Republicans could steal 100,000 votes in Ohio and nobody would notice it in the final tally.