Obama's ground game's ultimate impact might be underestimated in all this talk about ads and so on. This is simply anecdotal evidence, but I see his campaign outside the metro station near my work in Alexandria, VA pretty much every day for weeks now, and I've never seen a McCain campaigner, even though they're based two metro stops away.
Though I worry that this possible impact might be mitigated by all the voter-purging and driver's-license-requiring shenanigans going on.
I saw more Ron Paul campaigners than anyone and obviously we all know how that turned out.
In all probability, McCain is going to win. As stated earlier, people want so desperately to find reasons not to vote for Obama that it is almost depressing. I will say that a lot of it has to do with race ultimately. He won't play the race card but I will. Obama is just too different from the middle class whites (the largest bloc of voters) to be elected. It is just that the GOP is in such a bad position from Bush that Obama had a chance in the first place.
Obama's time was the summer. The GOP had nothing. They pretty much left themselves wide open for attack. However, Obama seemed to just ignore them entirely. I suppose he believed that he wanted to run a Kennedyesque campaign that ignored the GOP but as history shows, Kennedy barely won and thanks to the many payoffs from Joe Kennedy, Nixon probably would have won. The Wright thing was done, Hillary bowed out, bittergate was months past, etc. He didn't capitalize on the GOP inactivity. Once the GOP wagons circled, Obama's lead dropped like a sack of bricks. It was the same problem with the Kerry campaign. The problem ultimately was that they were never aggressive enough. Bill Clinton, although a moderate, knew how to attack the GOP jugular: the economy. He made it, along with foreign policy, a Democrat issue and let the GOP try to scramble to find something else (ultimately, they stuck with family values)
What made the gains in 2006 for Congress were the DINOs, the center-right Jim Webbs. Obama's mistake is that there was little effort to bring in the center-right, the same people that voted Democrat in 2006. Failing to capture that was a tremendous mistake because they're all going to McCain and will ultimately cost him the election.
Saying that the polls are inaccurate reeks of Ron Paul style delusion. They were convinced there was this huge pool of Paul supporters that never materialized. Unsurprisingly, the poll numbers accurately reflected his primary performance. I'm not going to pin Obama's future on the possibility that all these polls are wrong. Its fantasy and little more.
Sarah Palin has been set up as unattackable (not a real word but you get the point). The bar is so low for her that she can do no wrong. Palin makes the right foreign policy choices because her son is enlisted. Palin makes the right social issues because she has a pregnant daughter and a child with Down's. Palin makes the right economic decisions because she is a governor. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong because every angle will eventually be defended by her family or her brief position. The more the media attacks her, the better off she looks. McCain has chinks in his armor where Palin is such a wild card that she can play off of that and reconstruct herself as a soccer mom/political genius.
At this point, I'd just make sure that the Democrats have a solid majority in Congress. This will stop some of the more insane measures that McCain/Palin will try to push through. There might be that possibility that McCain was just chest thumping and will be willing to work with Democrats more than he suggesting.
