A favorite canard of the schmucks touting defeat is that all us pollyannas were saying the same thing in 2006. In 2006 most of us realized it was going to be a bad year, hardly anyone with half a brain was thinking it was going to end well. The metrics were bad for that election. This election though as you stated has a number of factors that on a basic common sense level point to a McCain victory. The tangibles you stated are spot on and I think the intangibles also. The Democrats really overreached this election with a brazen and in your face confrontational Marxist like Obama. He is a very polarizing figure. To use a bad analogy, he's the 1996 of Newt Gingrich on the left. Anecdotally people are reacting much more strongly than they did for Kerry or Gore. I know this is a cliche but besides the militant homosexuals, college students, old school communists and minorities I don't see how math adds up to 50-52% of the voting electorate as the polls show. It just doesn't, not because I want it to be so, it just is.