We’ve got a month until the presidential election. So, ‘zup?

There are a couple of major ‘net sites that try to do a professional job of collecting a “poll of polls” and then averaging them out, taking into account the margin of error. Pollster.com shows the race at 42.6 for McCain and 49.6 for Obama with 5.9 undecided. RealClearPolitics.com shows the race at 43.4 for McCain and 49.2 for Obama (undecideds are not reported). These are, however, only national numbers and aren’t taking into account the 50 individual state campaigns where electoral votes are gained and lost.

As many of you know, the McCain campaign this week abandoned Michigan and moved their paid staff and advertising dollars elsewhere.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency and Pollster shows 163 for McCain and 250 for Obama with 125 remaining as “toss up” or “battleground” states. RCP shows 163 for McCain and 264 for Obama with 111 as “toss up”.

All nine “toss up” states are states that were carried by Bush in 2004. Obama leads in 7 of the 9 “toss up” states. A “toss up” state is one, roughly, within 5% one way or the other. Indiana voted for Bush by 20 points four years ago and McCain leads by 2.2%. Bush carried Colorado by 4.7% four years ago and Obama now leads there by 4.4%. (All else remaining equal, Colorado puts Obama in the White House by itself with its 9 electoral votes.)

Both show the trend since the party conventions as McCain going down while Obama goes up and Pollster shows undecided going down from about 10 percent to about 5 percent. Using Pollster’s numbers, if we give 100% of undecideds to McCain, he still doesn’t catch up to Obama (there’s a small number not counted in there going to Nader, Barr, McKinney and even lesser known candidates).

Among other things, this means that McCain can’t win just by winning undecideds. He has to “convert” some of Obama’s “soft” support, in other words, drive Obama down in addition to driving himself up.

When I go to the places that track advertising, I find that McCain’s advertising buys have made a sharp turn. Just as he has given up on Michigan, he’s taken his “positive” ads out of rotation as of this coming Monday and will only run “negative” ads, attack ads, as far ahead as data is available. We won’t see much of them in Oklahoma because this state is already locked down for McCain and neither campaign will pay any attention to us.

I’ve been curious about how a reliable “blue” state like Minnesota could go into the “toss up” category and the ad buys gave me the answer. McCain has outspent Obama in Minnesota 3 to 1 in order to achieve this, although he still trails Obama by an amount within the margin of error of the polls. However, this means that he’s not able to spend that money in Florida, for example, where Obama has outspent McCain and Obama has taken his first tiny lead in Florida, about 3 points (but again within the margin of error of the polls).

Reporters friendly to the McCain campaign — the only ones the McCain campaign will talk to — report that the candidates themselves will also begin taking a much more aggressively negative tone in their speeches and rallies. It seems clear that in ads and perhaps on the part of Gov. Palin that Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and Antoine “Tony” Rezko will become much more prominent in their attacks on Obama. McCain today told a gathering of supporters at one of his “town hall” meetings that “the gloves come off” at next Tuesday’s debate.

There is one more level of the campaign that seems important to me to discuss and that is campaign volunteer organizations. One of the most helpful sites I visit is FiveThirtyEight.com, which takes polls and using mathematical formulas tries to make projections of the vote on Nov. 4 rather than simply look at the polling “snapshot” of the state of the race at the time of the polls. (They project Obama with 52% of the vote and 333 electoral votes and an 82% chance of winning.) They visited campaign offices at unannounced times in six states and found more volunteers making calls and doing work in a single Obama office in Grand Junction, CO, than all the McCain offices combined in the “toss up” states they visited. In addition, they contacted the campaigns in Ohio and found McCain’s organization was boasting of 20,000 calls per week in that vital electoral state; meanwhile, Obama’s campaign reported 212,000 calls and another 80,000 doors knocked. Obama’s Virginia campaign has exceeded their new voter registration goals and overall the Obama campaign has registered more than one million new voters, of which they estimate 75% were Obama voters. No one has ever seen such a massive campaign volunteer organization drive.

We haven’t yet seen polling from after last night’s vice presidential debate, but vice president debates — even the famous Bentson-Quayle “you’re no Jack Kennedy” one — has historically affected the race. The instant polls (highly unreliable) showed a Biden win (CNN, CBS and Fox all showed Biden with strong leads over Palin Thursday night).

Yes, I’m “in the tank” for Obama, but this is my best attempt at “straight” reporting of facts from non-partisan sources. My best conclusion is that the race is not nearly as “tight” as it is sometimes described and that absent unforseen circumstances — the capture of bin Laudin? another terrorist attack on the U.S.? — McCain will flail away in a very negative way but it won’t be enough to prevent an Obama win in 30 days.

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