UPDATED: This diary was massively, utterly, wonderfully wrong.
(I go back to 2002 here -- I have account ID #88. I'm coming out of a four-year diary posting hiatus just for this.)
We could be seeing this election slipping away from us. Obama's lead is shrinking and it's not just statistical noise.
The national trackers are tightening fast, and everyone seems to be ignoring it. But they have been tightening for a week now, and even "today's" numbers have an average age of two days. Extrapolating and averaging the better polls, Obama may only be ahead nationally by three points today, and the race may well be tied by Tuesday. Yes, the state polls look better, but if you think Obama is going to win Virginia by eight points when he's tied nationally, you'll be buying dozens of bridges in Alaska over the next four years. Nobody is going to win the electoral vote without coming within 1% in the national popular vote: thinking otherwise is relying on a crazy triple-bank shot.
And there are real reasons the polls are tightening. McCain and the GOP have settled into a good attack rhythm. It's one punch on Obama after another, while Obama runs a sunny, positive campaign that could seem vapid to an undecided voter. The fact that the attacks are ridiculous doesn't matter: swiftboating works by repetition and volume. The stock market is back up a bit, gas prices are way down, and the sense of financial/economic panic has subsided at least a little, so Republican economics might look a little less horrifying to low-information voters with short memories and attention spans.
Obama's positive message, inspiring as it is, seems to me tuned for last week's race, not this week's. I watched his 30-minute ad last night. He could have paused somewhere in there to say "Now, I want to spend a few minutes talking about why the things my opponents are saying about me are wrong, and why they are wrong for America." When I turn on the news, I hear Obama spouting "we have new hope, inspiration, and we're going to change America!" followed by "You don't know Obama very well, and he would be a dangerous president" said with some subtle racial slant. Those attacks will keep working unless Obama reminds people that McCain has a bad temperament and atrocious judgment. We have to keep the "play it safe," "devil-you-know" voters uncomfortable with McCain.
Incidentally, I think one of the reasons people are feeling better than they should is the (mostly wonderful) analysis on fivethirtyeight. Nate Silver does a great job, but his model doesn't discount old polling data very quickly and thus has a bit of inertia. And I don't completely agree with his dismissal of the "state polls lag" effect: individual state polls don't lag, but many states are not polled often so more recent events in the race aren't taken into account as well when aggregating the state polls into an electoral estimate. (I know Silver accounts for this by weighting older state polls for national trends, but many other estimates do not.)
If I had to make an (admittedly unscientific) guess as to McCain's probability of pulling off a squeaker given the dynamics of the race now, I would put it at 25%. The electoral vote could easily come down to PA, VA, and CO; if the second-tier swing states break for McCain I could see him pulling it out with two of those three.
(Now, if you want to feel better, I was an optimist at this point in 2004 and thought Gore would lose badly in 2000; so much for my predictions. Maybe I should have remained silent after all.)