AP Poll: Obama takes a 7-point lead over McCain

Very true, but both FiveThirtyEight.com and electoral-vote.com had Bush winning the electoral college at this point in 2004, and electoral-vote's totals were damn close to the final numbers.

There could be two reasons why there would be a sudden shift to Obama: Obama's own strengths or McCain's weaknesses.

Long before the crisis, McCain all but admitted he didn't know about the economy. And one of his advisers called the American people whiners for worrying about the economy.

I would think it perfectly reasonable for somoene to then say "I didn't think about the economy much until all this crap started coming down. I don't want that McCain guy in charge of our economy when it's in crisis."

How do you figure?

...Or, they could look at McCain on the economy and distrust him.

Spoken like a true chinaman!

If Obama does end up winning the Presidency this nation will be getting exactly what it deserves.

I'm beginning to think that we do need another Jimmy Carter type of President to remind the nation just how screwed up the Democrats can be especially regarding their solution to most any problem, that of new and increased taxes, and expanding its control over the people of the nation.

Well any problems will just be pawned off as Bush's leftover problems.

Probably like you said, start WW3......it's about as low as it can get right now.

Bullshit.

How about 'world wide economic collapse.' If we get to that point than everything will be worse, including the possibility of war for needed resources, hyper inflation, mass starvation, even greater ecological damage (starving people don't give a shit about polar bears), civil insurrection, the possibility of the rise of new forms of extremist regimes like fascism or communism, reduced health care due to the economic cost in a deplete economy leading to pandemics, etc ad nausea.

If you don't think things can be worse than they are now you are just completely and utterly ignorant.

I hope the ignorant don't have to find out how wrong they could be.

Well, most of Wrodforge's response to the bail-out has been along the lines of "let them die"...

As if a destabilized global economy would just be a cake-walk...

Wouldn't such a collapse almost certainly start WWIII?

And I'll second Dan's question: realistically, what could Obama do to trigger this?

Or carbon footprints.

We are talking about trillion dollar bailouts in the US economy alone - you don't think if they woefully mishandle the economic issue and the credit crunch it could have severe consequences? If the US economy spirals out of control, wouldn't it effect markets world-wide?

Obviously that's the worst case scenario, but yes, it could be worse. At the moment the vast majority of us are fed, have jobs, have prospects, and enjoy peace in our personal lives.

We aren't in the best situation in our recent history, but we are in a great situation compared to how the vast majority of humans have lived their lives.

Assuming that it can't go back to that if we lack wisdom is naive. I believe humanity as a whole is brilliant, but we aren't always wise.

Yeah, it's totally not like that now, huh?

Not in the classic sense - the major powers will never go directly at war against each other again, as long as nukes are on the table. I think we'd more likely see the rise of Empire - each superpower divying up its local area for resources. So a world at war, but the great powers not fighting each other.

Well, in fairness, I think very few if any voters really understand what is going on. Many folks (you, me, other thoughtful students of economy and politics) have ideas about it, but does anybody really understand a clusterfuck this large?

Yes, that's how it usually plays out. People still blame Carter and Hoover for things, many of which were neither mans fault. For better or worse, Bush is going to be lumped with them.

This is really no different than what happened to Hoover after the great depression hit. Americans always look at the president as the be all and end all of power. It's quite sad how ignorant so many of them are on how government works.

New polls show Obama gaining in 5 battleground states.

This isn't just a "hiccup" anymore...or a shift....it's a genuine trend.

A solid, steady, inexorable trend.

Dare I even entertain the thought of a...a....landslide in November!?

The avalanche has started...and the pebbles are gonna vote.

So is this a scientific poll or the usual 75% democrat voters and 25% republican voters poll???

It's the usual, delusional wishful thinking of the left. There will be no landslide. Obama will probably win more or less comfortably, but it will not be anything like a landslide.

To people like bryce, however, there is comfort and affirmation in having large numbers of people agree with you. The reason is hard to pin down, since how many people believe something has relatively little to do with whether or not it is true, but there it is.

You are just bitter because your team is losing.

Increasing taxes on the job creators, the small business owner while ramping up "social programs", eschewing sensible energy development in oil, coal, and nuclear while pouring money into "green jobs", and subverting US interests in military policy and guns to the whims of the UN and caving to tin-pot dictators would all make the next four years a nightmare for America and the world.

That's not quite the right question to ask. The last two terms have done a lot of damage to, nonexclusively, the U.S's reputation, to civil rights in the U.S., to U.S. military preparedness, and to the U.S. and world economies. The thing is that much of the damage can still be fixed.

The thing that makes a potential McCain administration so scary isn't so much that they'll do worse things than were done during the last two terms, although I do think a McCain administration would be marginally worse in that sense than a hypothetical four more years of Bush; it's that a McCain administration will, on most points, make it vastly more likely than an Obama administration that we don't get a start on fixing things and is very likely to take us past the point where some of these things can be fixed. If we want to save the U.S.'s reputation and diplomatic power, we need to drive a stake through the heart of neoconservatism and we need to do it now. It's just not something that can wait. If we want to make sure that our military is in a state of sufficient preparedness when a real crisis calling for military intervention occurs five years from now, we'd better not let McCain anywhere near being Commander in Chief. If we want to end counterproductive torture we need to start by not electing McCain, who flipped like a victim of Stockholm syndrome and decided that he was cool with letting the CIA torture whomever it felt like so long as the military's hands were kept off the actual implements of torture. If we want to start to fix the economy then we should be locking up friends of Phil Gramm in Leavenworth, not putting them in the White House.

The question to ask if you want to get at how things can be made "worse" is how can the faults of the past eight years be exacerbated, not how can our government exhibit worse judgment than over the past eight years. And in the end it's pretty clear that four years of McCain will serve to make the legacy of eight years of bush significantly worse and longer lasting. Obama won't be great, especially on the consolidation of power within the executive branch of which he's an inexplicable fan, but at least he gives us a chance of mitigating the Bush legacy.

My God.

Your such a drone.

Looking at the map and factoring in historic trends and places where I don't trust the polling, it seems to me that it's still a matter of three stats which are in doubt:

Colorado, Florida, and Virginia.

Obama wins any one of those and he wins, and I can't, at the present, see McCain sweeping all three.

Unless there's a major shift from some unforeseen event.

Have you seen the sampling for these "polls"?

It's more like...small numbers of people who may or may not really agree with them in phone interviews.

Statistical sampling is valid. Where polls break-down is in the way a question is asked, or in an effort to determine who will actually vote. Sample sizes such as these are quite reasonable, though.

^^^
I recognize the validity of sample size - but I do wonder if 666 people in North Carolina is a valid sample of the population of that state to get to a 4 point MoE

It seems small to get that small a margin.

Especially when you consider how well that relatively small number can be matched to the demographics of the population over all, including voting trends.

Seems to me that you end up with a situation where, if you suppose that 10% of NC is Hispanic, then you are projecting that whole Demographic based on roughly 66 people.

I find that hard to believe.