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The Obama campaign has to be concerned that Florida, Missouri, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado are all starting to drift away from them. Ohio is probably their best bet to flip enough EVs to win the election, but McCain has been running strong there as well.

This race is very close to being dead even right now.

The problem is the race is "dead even" on our home turf. There is not a single blue state, with the possible exception of Michigan, where we have a prayer of taking an electoral vote away from Obama. We are like homelandsecurity, we must be perfect everywhere all the time or the terrorists win. Playing defense is the way you lose wars and elections and we are back on our heels everywhere.

In addition to the electoral College other more subjective measures such as , party registration, crowd size, money, enthusiasm, tenure in office, unpopularity of George Bush, state of the economy, gas prices, media support, and momentum, Obama is light-years ahead.

If these factors have play in any one of the threatened red states which you mention, the presidential election is lost.

We here on FreeRepublic are as liable to become insular in our thinking as any other self-selected group. So we assume that the rest of America thinks and votes the way we do and it is only a question of time until the great mushy middle of America wakes up to the threat posed by a Marxist named Barak Hussein Obama. There is also a tendency among many Freepers to equate realism with defeatism and to try to counterweight it with cheerleading or, in extreme examples, with browbeating.

The danger in refusing to contemplate the worst case scenario was demonstrated to us on Friday by Lindsey Graham's gang of five which may have thrown away the only chance for Republican survival in this election. I listened to Saxby Chambliss being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh, and I came away convinced that Chambliss is living in a bubble and has not a clue about the disaster which is about to cripple the Republican Party and consign conservatism to the wilderness for a generation. If you did have a clue, or view was worried about anybody's election but his own, he would not have thrown away the only issue which might have saved the day.

If George Bush had agreed with my analysis instead of presumably agreeing with those who see no danger, he might've convened Congress to act on energy. If John McCain was half as pessimistic as I am, he might have curbed Lindsey Graham. He might indeed have more aggressively played the issue handed to him by a few stalwart Republicans standing in the well of the House in the dark.

This is not an election season in which anybody is going to catch Obama if he ever takes a real lead. The media simply will not permit it. He has too many other advantages going for him. There will be no catch up as we saw in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Come to think of it, we did not really catch up in 2000. I remember waiting in vain for George H. W. Bush to catch up in 1992. This is almost a metaphor for the dilemma we are in geographically. If Obama takes any red state, we lose. If Obama can capitalize on any of the factors which are running against us this cycle, we lose. If Obama can just take a lead, we lose. We must be perfect everywhere all the time in order to scrape out a win as narrow as Bush enjoyed in the last two cycles in the electoral College.

I don't like our chances.

There is not a single blue state, with the possible exception of Michigan, where we have a prayer of taking an electoral vote away from Obama.

Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon and New Hampshire are all close and were all states won by Kerry last time around. I'd say we at least have a "prayer" in all of them even though we aren't favored to win any of them.

I'll agree with you that Obama should be the favorite right now. He has a lot of structural issues working in his favor. McCain is hanging in right there with him though and there is still a long, long way to go.

“We here on FreeRepublic are as liable to become insular in our thinking as any other self-selected group. So we assume that the rest of America thinks and votes the way we do and it is only a question of time until the great mushy middle of America wakes up to the threat posed by a Marxist named Barak Hussein Obama. There is also a tendency among many Freepers to equate realism with defeatism and to try to counterweight it with cheerleading or, in extreme examples, with browbeating.”

Amen, Brother Nathan. Great post. I would add that in a race this close GOTV is going to be critical and McCain doesn’t even have his ground game in place in a lot of states yet. Obama has the money advantage to bus the youth and black vote to the polls in swing states and the plans to do just that have already been made. Local media here in Florida are talking about a huge registration push in black neighborhoods in the final days before registration closes, and if BO’s campaign is doing it here they’re doing it in other swing states.

The ground game is why Bush won, narrowly, in ‘04 and its importance should not be underestimated. Turnout, turnout, turnout is everything.

The youth and black vote is also notoriously difficult to poll. The black vote will crawl across cut glass to vote for Obama. The youth vote is less dependable, but even if youth turnout increases by a percent or two it could swing a purple state.

Freepers are way overconfident, IMO.