McCain is really dreaming this election. With polls showing a solid Obama win for about a month now with both the popular and electoral votes, something pretty drastic would have to happen within the next week (especially with a substantial number of people having already voted). At this point all McCain can do is dream...much like Al Franken did during a skit on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live on November 5, 1988. Remember that? I do...and he was way ahead of his time...if you know what I mean...
I haven't seen that skit in 20 years, yet I remember it as if it were on TV yesterday. Al Franken came onto Weekend Update with a black magic marker and a white board and started drawing a map of the United States. As he drew his map, he placed Ds and Rs in the states, based on predictions for each state--whether they'd vote for Michael Dukakis or George Bush I, respectively. And, he gave his reasoning. Of course, states like Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts were pretty easy to place Ds in, but he came up with plausible reasons for swing states of that time to go for Dukakis. I'm not sure if it was in this skit (or if it was somewhere else) that the distant possibility of hunters in Arkansas going hunting instead of voting (because election day is during hunting season) would swing that state to Dukakis. Well...worth a few good laughs, at least.
Anyway, I couldn't find any video of this...but at least I could find a small snapshot of part of his map. Looks like the typical blue state/red state splits (looks like Indiana and Ohio are red, but the other Great Lakes and Northeastern states are blue--the only parts of the map drawn so far at the time of the snapshot). In a way, Al Franken was kind of ahead of his time, because at no point in history up to that point (including the ultimate result in '88) had there ever been any sort of electoral map like we've seen in 2000 or 2004 (his map basically looked similar to the 2000 map--except for Arkansas and maybe a handful of other states).
It was fun that weekend before the election in '88 knowing that there was a possibility (however distant) that Dukakis could win. The most important thing to note is that this was a possibility, not a probability. Thus, McCain's dream of getting 270 or more, including his "must-win" state of Pennsylvania, is exactly that...a possibility (again, however distant) but not a probability.
By the way, Al Franken still likes to display his talent of drawing state maps of the US from scratch (something I've done before too--for fun). Here's a video showing an example (how I'd LLLLLOVE to see that SNL from '88 though)!!!