The Note: Sun Will Come Out

Nov. 3, 2008— -- Here at the final table . . .

The Wright and Clinton cards are getting played (late) . . .

Barack Obama won't be answering questions . . .

John McCain won't be having another town hall . . .

Obama is giving Sarah Palin more airtime than McCain is . . .

Both candidates get one final messaging shot, on "Monday Night Football" . . .

The expanded map is shrinking into focus . . .

And, as always, it's about the stubborn math.

The presidential candidates are taking their final, hectic laps through the states that will determine the election with the typical last-minute barbs and surprise (but not really) new attack lines.

Less than 24 hours before the voting starts, it's really this simple: If McCain stands a realistic chance, all the numbers and the smart folks have to be systematically and completely wrong -- or need to be made wrong inside of 24 hours.

Messaging and prognosticating are subsumed by realities like turnout at this stage -- and numbers, at last, take over for spin. That means an even narrower path to victory for a campaign that's trying to do more than just go through the final, inevitable motions.

"Heading into Tuesday's election, every major independent poll gives Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama the lead over his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain," Stephen Dinan writes in the Washington Times. "In the state-by-state matchup, the news is also good for Mr. Obama -- the polls suggest he will easily flip Iowa, which went Republican in 2004, and has a lead in a series of other traditionally Republican 'red' states: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico."

ABC's George Stephanopoulos notes the relatively stability of the polls, and the shrinking universe of undecideds: "We think only 8 percent [of the remaining voters] are undecided, and we think they break pretty evenly for McCain and Obama," he said on "Good Morning America" Monday.

Six big battlegrounds close their polls by 8 pm ET: Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida. To have a realistic shot at 270, McCain needs to win at least five out of the six.

Predictions, from Stephanopoulos and his "This Week" roundtable: Stephanopoulos sees 353 Obama electoral votes, plus 58 Democratic Senate seats; George Will says 378 and 59; Matthew Dowd, 338 and 59; Mark Halperin 349 and 58 members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

"Barring an extraordinary shock, Barack Obama will win more than 270 electoral votes on Tuesday, giving him the White House. Hours before voting starts, John McCain has no clear path to reaching that same goal," Halperin writes. "In fact, based on interviews with political strategists in both parties, election analysts and advisers to both presidential campaigns -- including a detailed look at public and private polling data -- an Obama victory with well over 300 electoral votes is a more likely outcome than a McCain victory."

Get ready for a fierce close: McCain hits seven states in his final full day of campaigning: Florida, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona.

Obama visits Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia on Monday.

Palin stumps in Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada; for Biden, it's Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

"We think we can catch this guy," McCain guru Mark Salter tells The Washington Post's Libby Copeland.

"At the very end of the marathon, you get your second wind," said Sarah Palin.

"During stops in Pennsylvania, which Democrat John Kerry won four years ago, McCain said he remains 'a few points' behind rival Barack Obama in the Keystone State. McCain is seven points behind in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, but the GOP nominee predicted a historic comeback," USA Today's David Jackson writes.

The last hope: The undecideds. "If Barack Obama hasn't closed the deal with them after two years in the campaign and a year as the nominee of their party, maybe they're holding out for a good reason," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters late Sunday, per Politico's Jonathan Martin.

Check this for tone, though: "One candidate's got clean uniforms, a lot of training and all the money in the world. I feel like I'm the Tampa Bay Rays playing against the New York Yankees." On the market turmoil: "The politics played out poorly for us."

Close with a smile, anyone? "The waning hours of the longest presidential campaign in history elicited a fresh round of stinging attacks from Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain and their supporters on Sunday, a departure from the positive messages that candidates normally revert to before an election," Shailagh Murray, Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes write for The Washington Post.

"As the electoral map shrinks in these final hours, Ohio has become a must-win for McCain. But if Obama succeeds here, it will avenge not only the Kerry and Gore defeats but also his loss to Clinton during the primary, a defeat that underscored Obama's struggles with working-class white voters," they write.

In Ohio, and elsewhere: "It's downright Rove-ian, by design. Team Obama is mimicking the get-out-the-vote strategy refined by Karl Rove, Bush's reviled election mastermind, who mobilized armies of people to get their neighbors out to vote for Bush in 2000 and 2004," Michael McAuliff writes in the New York Daily News.

On the other side: "John McCain has targeted this wealthy area just north of Columbus as one of 15 counties in Ohio where he needs to drive up his vote tally if he is to beat Barack Obama on Tuesday in this must-win state," Bob Drogin and Robin Abcarian report in the Los Angeles Times. "But on Friday night, only nine volunteers manned the 24 phones in the McCain campaign office. The phone bank began operating on a daily basis just two weeks ago. And since then, only five people have shown up on most weekdays to canvass local neighborhoods."

A last burst of battleground-state polling, from Quinnipiac:
Ohio: Obama 50, McCain 43
Florida: Obama 47, McCain 45
Pennsylvania: Obama 52, McCain 42
Even a tight Florida race doesn't qualify as good news for a campaign that will look for it anywhere these days.

It's 54-43 in the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll: "Barack Obama, closing strongly in the campaign's final weekend, matched his best advantage over John McCain to date in the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll," ABC polling director Gary Langer writes. "Economic concerns are pushing his support beyond the Democratic base to unusual levels in the political center and even among more traditionally Republican groups."

Langer continues: "Part of Obama's advantage comes from his campaign's ability to turn out early voters; 27 percent say they've already cast their ballots, a strongly pro-Obama group, 59-40 percent. Among first-time voters, moreover, Obama has a nearly 2-1 advantage; many of them are young, and young voters are his strongest supporters."