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Originally Posted by Nate Silver @ FiveThirtyEight.com
, we show John McCain with a 5.9 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, a figure that will seem implausibly low to many of you. But here's a bit of context from John Harwood at the New York Times:
In the latest Gallup tracking poll, Mr. Obama leads Mr. McCain 50 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Mr. McCain’s deficit in that survey has remained seven percentage points or more for most of the last two weeks.
Since Gallup began presidential polling in 1936, only one candidate has overcome a deficit that large, and this late, to win the White House: Ronald Reagan, who trailed President Jimmy Carter 47 percent to 39 percent in a survey completed on Oct. 26, 1980.
There were 18 elections between 1936 and 2004, and in just one of those -- the 1980 race that Harwood mentions -- did a trailing candidate come back from a deficit this large in mid-October to win the election. One divided into 18 is 5.6 percent, which almost exactly matches our 5.9 percent estimate for Mr. McCain.
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http://www.FiveThirtyEight.com (probably THE most accurate electoral projection site) has McCain at only a 5.9% chance of a win, as of yesterday 10/12/08. Today it's slightly higher at 6.3%, so he's gaining ground somewhere in one of the swing states. But you'd have to be a fool to believe that the two are "neck and neck". To put things in perspective:
Chance of Obama winning by a landslide (taking 375 EVs):
42.41%
Chance of McCain winning by any kind of margin:
6.3%
That doesn't mean Obama can just coast to a victory now though. As in the quoted text above, Ronald Regan pulled off a similar come-from-behind deficit. But then again, McCain and Regan are two completely different paint jobs.