Leading in every poll, Obama heads for a landslide

WASHINGTON: The momentum for Barack Obama is so great now that Democrats are swinging wildly between giddy euphoria and fearful disbelief. \"Stick a fork in McCain, he\'s done!\" one Obama supporter chortled on TV. Moments later, he said it ain\'t over till it\'s over.Every single poll now shows Democrat Barack Obama leading Republican John McCain by anywhere from five to ten points. A poll of polls averaging six prominent surveys gives Obama a 52-41 lead with seven per cent undecided. Unless Obama makes a big mistake now, McCain is a goner, says David Gergen, the respected political commentator.Republicans look and sound like the Australian cricket team. The swagger is gone; they have their backs to the wall. Obama is the Democratic Dhoni for now. Everything he touches is turning to gold.The fact that he took two days off from the campaign trail at a crucial time to go visit his seriously ailing grandmother in Hawaii was seen by some as confidence that he is on a roll. Others saw it as highlighting the fact that he has a white maternal grandmother.Madelyn Dunham, the woman he affectionately calls \"Toot,\" short for the Hawaiian word \"tutu\" for grandparent -- brought him up when his single white mother was traveling when he was a kid. Pundits say the gesture, while genuine, can only help him in the polls.Some of the most significant pointers to a possible Obama landslide came in an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll on Monday that put him 52-42 ahead of McCain, up from a six-point lead weeks ago. The 10-point lead is the largest in the Journal/NBC poll since both men claimed their parties\' nominations, and represents a steady climb for Obama since early September, when the political conventions concluded with the candidates in a statistical tie.The survey shows that Obama is now starting to extend his lead in almost every major voter segment, mainly on account of the economic crisis. He leads suburban voters by 12 points, up from two points two weeks ago. He holds a 12 point advantage with independents, up by four from two weeks ago. He even leads among voters older than 65 by nine points, erasing a one-point McCain advantage.Some of the most striking advances he has made have been in the Midwest, home to a swath of battleground states, where he is now favored by a staggering 25 points, up from a one-point advantage. A rattled McCain camp is on the run from states such as Iowa and Colorado, deep in the Republican heartland. To use a kabaddi term, Obama is now raiding deep into the Republican territory.The McCain campaign has already pulled out stakes (and finance and advertising) from Michigan to try and concentrate on Pennsylvania, where they still have an outside chance. In the American system, once a candidate establishes an insurmountable lead in one state, the rival does not waste time, money and resources on that state, preferring to divert it to state where the race is still close. It\'s one of the quirks of a system where a candidate who wins the popular vote of a state (even by a few votes) wins all the electoral votes. The number of electoral votes in each state is the sum of the number of Senators (2) and Congressmen (variable).As a result, the election is virtually over or uncontested in almost 40 states. The so-called battleground states number around ten. And in almost every one of them, Obama has the momentum.It won\'t be anything like Ronald Reagan\'s rout of Walter Mondale in 1984 (when he won 49 of 50 states and 525 out of 538 electoral votes), because there are more than a dozen states which McCain has wrapped up. But the Obama camp, no-hopers when they began their campaign, are certainly eyeing 300-plus now.

http://www.s7news.com/story/3984