Fat lady warming up

Nate Silver's projection is not alone in giving Sen. Obama a high likelihood of winning the election.

"Sen. John McCain has his work cut out for him if he is to win the presidency and there does not appear to be a role model for such a comeback in the last half century," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Basically, since the widespread use of television no candidate has won the presidency after being this far behind one month before the election.

You would have to go back to Truman-Dewey, and the pollsters missed a last-month shift in that election (last Gallup poll was 3 weeks before election!). Also in 1948, there was serious systematic error in that random voter samples were not collected. So Truman was probably never as far behind as the polls indicated.