I was playing around with electoral vote totals this morning, trying to figure if there was some route via which John McCain could win. Assuming someone doesn't come up with proof that Barack Obama funded the 9/11 hijackers or something equally game-changing, he pretty much has a lock on states totalling 264 electoral votes. That's all the states John Kerry won plus Iowa and New Mexico (252 + 7 + 5). So he's six short of the big 270.
The "swing" states turn out to be Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Obama appears to be ahead in all these but in some cases, the lead is within the margin of error or is contradicted by occasional other polls that give McCain a slight lead. I'm not considering anyone "ahead" unless they're ahead by more than the margin of error through multiple polls conducted by multiple firms.
If McCain can win all seven of those states, he wins the White House. That sure doesn't look likely to me. Today's Public Policy Polling survey has Obama up seven points in North Carolina. Rasmussen has him ahead of McCain in Virginia by ten points. There are also polls that show closer numbers but it's hard to see how McCain could win all seven. But that's pretty much what it would take.
If Obama wins Nevada (5 electoral votes) and McCain wins the other six along with every other state where he's presently ahead, we wind up with a 269-269 tie and the election gets decided by the House of Representatives. Since the Democrats would dominate that vote, Obama would win.
And if Obama wins even one of the other six "swing" states, all of which have more than five electoral votes, he'd have the 270 necessary to win. Those states may be all we need to watch. Obama could also win with Indiana's 11 electoral votes or get partway to 270 with Montana (3) and/or West Virginia (5) — but those are all states where McCain presently has a small lead. Presumably, if Obama had enough of a landslide going to pick up those states, he wouldn't need them.
By the way: I said in this post that Kerry in '04 received 251 electoral votes so Obama needed 19 to get to 270. That's misleading. The combined electoral votes of the states won by the Kerry-Edwards ticket actually totalled 252. When the Electoral College convened and the votes were actually cast, one of the Kerry electors made a mistake on his ballot so his vote was voided and Kerry officially received 251. But the relevant number is that if/when Obama wins all the same states, he'll have the 252 noted above. I don't see any poll anywhere that thinks that's not going to happen.