Chicken Dinner / 17 October 2008 Free Bet

After months of gruelling campaign slog, it's starting to look like John McCain can at last start looking forward to the next four years. He can play a little golf, shoot some beer cans off fence posts and add to his output of crushingly tedious books; anything but worry about doing anything presidential .

"You are more likely to be killed by a meteor dropping on your head than McCain becoming president," said election number-cruncher Professor Michael McDonald of Virginia's George Mason University to Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian yesterday.

John McCain hasn't enjoyed a lead in any national poll since the second week of September. Since Barack Obama got his nose in front, that gap has just gone on widening. The Real Clear Average of polls currently has him seven points in front, while a CBS/New York Times poll has Obama 14 points ahead.

According to the Guardian, "Pollsters said no US candidate has ever been as far behind as McCain at this stage in an election in recent political history and won. Once the electorate shifts in favour of a candidate, as it seems to have done over the last few weeks, it seldom moves again."

However, the last couple of weeks have not been a glorious period for the prediction industry - with barely an exception, not a single economic mandarin spotted the economic blood clot that so nearly stopped the world's financial heart dead. In spite of having their credibility as a profession completely shot, plenty of forecasters still have the nerve to pop up with opinions about exactly when we can expect various sectors of the economy to revive.

There are certainly plenty of instances in the past when their political fortune-telling instruments also went haywire. In same Guardian piece, MacAskill writes "The pollsters ...[got] the New Hampshire primary in January spectacularly wrong. Hillary Clinton won, even though the polls had given Obama big leads. Last year, Clinton had enjoyed a lead of 30% nationally over Obama in the autumn, only to see it evaporate within a month or so."

If McCain is searching for a glimmer of hope in inaccurate polling information, however, he's probably wasting his time. The blog FiveThirtyEight, run a by a baseball stats obsessive called Nate Silver, has been tracking the election, and enjoyed such success in forecasting the primaries that he has been described, if such a thing exists, as "the hottest thing in political polling". FiveThirtyEight gives Obama an even greater chance of winning the election. A recent feature on the Silver phenomenon in New York magazine says, "As of October 8, Silver's simulations had Obama winning the election 90 percent of the time." By October 15, that figure had risen to 95.1 per cent.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, even Karl Rove, engineer of both President Bush's election successes and general Republican mischief maker, is down on McCain's chances. Writing in the Wall Street Journal he sees a tiny chink of light in the number of people who have yet to make their mind up - "the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election." Even he, though, is forced to conclude that "If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now."

Barack Obama is [1.15] on Betfair to win. John McCain is [7.4]