WASHINGTON // If you believe some of the media buzz and political punditry just three weeks before election day, the hard-fought and historic presidential race is already in the bag: Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, will win in a landslide. Fuelled by the faltering economy and the perception of a majority of US voters that he is the best candidate to fix it, Mr Obama has built a formidable lead in most national polls and improved his chances in key battleground states. The math has caused some analysts - including Republican ones - to proclaim John McCain, the Republican nominee, as dead in the water. William Kristol, a prominent conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote on Monday that Mr McCain should "fire his campaign" because it is "overmatched" and "dysfunctional". "If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed," he wrote. He added that Mr McCain could still pull off an unlikely victory, but only by drastically changing his strategy. Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican strategist and national chairman of the 2008 presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, also predicted ruin. "With one debate remaining and less than three weeks of campaigning left, John McCain's 10-year quest to be president is coming to a close and - as of today - a dreadful one," Mr Rollins wrote in a column for CNN.com. But strategists from both sides also know that a lot can change in the final three weeks of an election, particularly in the uncharted territory of the 2008 presidential contest, where US voters will elect their first black president or first female vice president. The electoral map and the demographics of voters are changing, and the unknowns make this election one of the hardest to predict. It certainly is not over in the eyes of Mr McCain, who has battled from seemingly insurmountable odds before and says he can do it again. After all, Mr McCain was all but written off by the national press during the Republican primary before an unlikely victory in New Hampshire breathed new life into his campaign. Now he is hoping for another New Hampshire-like comeback. "Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We're six points down. The national media has written us off," Mr McCain said on Monday at a rally in Virginia, a crucial battleground state. "But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we've got them just where we want them." Mr McCain was referring to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll made public on Sunday that showed his rival with a national lead of 49 per cent to 43 per cent. He told his supporters that the lead was enough for Mr Obama to start "measuring the drapes" in the White House. Other polls have shown wider margins. The latest Gallup tracking poll shows Mr Obama ahead nationally by seven percentage points, and a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Monday shows Mr Obama with a 10-point advantage among likely voters. Still, the only number that really matters is the vote count on Nov 4, and there is plenty of time to change the outcome, said Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in the fiercely contested state of Pennsylvania. Those who consider the race over "don't have a very great sense of history, and they also don't have a very good sense of John McCain," Mr Gerow said. "He's already had one political obituary written about him." If Mr McCain hopes to reverse the tide, he will have to make his move during tonight's presidential debate at Hofstra University in New York. The event is the final face-to-face meeting between the candidates and the last potentially game-changing event before election day. But Mr McCain will have to try something different than what he has done in his previous two debates, which did not significantly improve his standing with voters and, according to some polls, actually made voters think worse of him. Few are under the illusion that it will be easy for Mr McCain to reverse the movement towards Mr Obama, who is also outspending him by a widening margin. After all, the numbers for Republicans are not pretty. Recent polls suggest that Mr Obama has opened leads in several pivotal battlegrounds - including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida - and he is also forcing Mr McCain to defend states, such as Indiana, that were once considered solidly Republican turf. Mr Obama has opened up double-digit leads in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin and has a nine-point edge over Mr McCain in Colorado, according to a poll released yesterday by Quinnipiac University and conducted with The Wall Street Journal and washingtonpost.com. Last week, a report by the Wisconsin Advertising Project said Mr Obama outspent Mr McCain in television advertising US$17.5m (Dh64.2m) to $11m between Sept 28 and Oct 4. Ten of the 15 states where the two candidates have purchased airtime are states that George W Bush carried in 2004. Still, the changing political fortunes also present a challenge to Mr Obama, who now must check his own campaign for overconfidence. "We are not going to take anything for granted," Mr Obama told about 250 donors at a Philadelphia fund-raiser last week, according to Bloomberg news agency. "We are going to hunt for votes everywhere we can." Feeling too secure can be "dangerous," said Mark Siegel, a Democratic strategist in Washington and political director of the Democratic National Convention in 1976. "It could always affect turnout, and it could affect the ground game ? obviously we've seen 10-point leads disappear in elections," Mr Siegel said. "But structurally it's hard to see how that would happen, other than another attack on US soil." Despite the polls and pundits, Mr Obama has other causes for concern. The Democrat is expecting an unprecedented turnout by young voters, a demographic that has proven unreliable when it comes to voting on election day. Mr Obama will also have to overcome the so-called "Bradley effect" - named for Tom Bradley, a black candidate who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite leading in some polls. The theory behind it holds that some voters who say they are going to vote for a black candidate change their minds at the last minute. And unlikely comebacks have happened before, though Mr McCain's would be the steepest climb in modern presidential elections. In the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan trailed the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, in a late October Zogby Poll by 47 per cent to 39 per cent. He went on to win the election in a landslide, with many attributing his success to his performance in a televised debate. That will likely be an inspiration in the final stretch for Mr McCain, who often invokes Mr Reagan as a personal hero. "In this political environment three weeks is a lifetime," said Mr Gerow, the Republican strategist. "Just look back three weeks, the campaign looked totally different." sstanek@thenational.ae
