All this is meant to convey one message: Democrats, don’t you get your hopes up too much just yet.

This race is going to tighten to microscopic margins, and John McCain might yet win.

That’s why Barack Obama’s campaign is pushing people to vote early, and vote now, while Obama is still high up in the polls. This is especially the case in Ohio, where the Democratic state leadership has done everything it can, within the confines of the law, to allow early voting everywhere — especially in districts which in 2000 and 2004 were very close, and which narrowly went for Bush.

And Obama’s campaign just might have learned something from Tom Bradley’s campaign for governor of California, in 1982. The Bradley Effect is named after him — but for the wrong reasons. The Bradley Effect, in my book at least, had everything to do with motivation and early voting, not with racism.

Tom Bradley led his white Republican counterpart in the polls by a wide margin, but in the end lost. Many to this day wrongly say that it was racism that led white people to say to pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley, while in the end, they voted for the white candidate.

Not so.  Closer examination of the polls leading up to the election in hindsight showed Bradley’s lead narrowing significantly. In the end, Bradley’s lead had evaporated to just 45-44.  He then lost the election because of early voting; Republican voters simply were more motivated than their complacent Democratic counterparts, and they went out to vote early in massive numbers, precisely because Bradley was out-polling their favourite candidate.

This is the Bradley Effect the McCain is now banking on. Team McCain is hoping that the strong polling numbers of Obama will motivate McCain voters to go out to vote early.

Team Obama is trying to do two things at once: dilute the Bradley Effect, and gain the upper hand in the process while he is still leading McCain in the polls.

And that’s smart thinking by people who seem to know their campaigns history. Election Night on November 4 will tell who outsmarted who. This fight could still go either way.

I have three reasons to doubt polls more than ever.

1. Barack Obama is black. There, I’ve said it. Now, Big Black Hole Numero Uno is: how many people are telling the truth, when they get their evening phone call by a pollster’s volunteer who asks whether they’ll be voting Obama or McCain, and when they’re asked whether race is an issue? I can’t imagine one person who will blurt “Oh I ain’t voting for that guy, he’s black!” The irritating thing is, that nodoby knows whether this is an issue at all. So it’s a black hole in a black hole.

2. Turnout. This is the Holy Grail for Democratic pollsters. (And something more of them are desperately clinging to.) There are scores of strategists within the Obama campaign who believe that voter turnout this year is going to trump all records. And of course, they believe that most of those newly registered voters will turn out to vote for Obama.

I don’t believe it. Yes, Obama-leaning people have been registering in massive numbers, but the Big Question — which none of the polling companies or aggregators can answer — is whether it will be enough to offset the number of McCain-leaners. And, for that matter, no one seems to have measured whether the legion of the Anybody But Obama-crowd, who weren’t motivated to turn out until the rise of Sarah Palin, is now going to turn out to vote after all.

3. Doubt. People are still too much in doubt, that’s maybe the one thing that’s strikingly obvious from the polls (and a safe thing to conclude). People are swinging wildly, like a pendulum that’s out of whack.

And heck, aside from those three things, I’ve never trusted polls as absolutist measurements of popular opinion. I merely view them as harbingers of trends.

I for one do not believe that the unpolled people — those who ordinarily don’t go out to vote, but who the Democrats believe will now turn out in massive numbers — are a different species from those who are being polled.

Take a bunch of unlikely voters, compare their voting trends to those of likely voters, and you’ll see pretty much the same picture.

So therefore, I personally believe that if there’s going to be a higher turnout, that it will be divided among trend lines. And those trends do not look good for Barack Obama.

No matter which way you look at it — from the left, the right, from down below, above or behind — one can only conclude one thing: Obama is losing support, and McCain has made a huge comeback. And that’s still trending. Even the clearly Obama-leaning folks over at Fivethirtyeight.com have toned down their rhetoric; it seems as if they, too have resigned themselves to a fairly strong possibility of McCain winning the elections.

There’s no denying it. McCain’s comeback is HUGE. It also shows just how much a lot of independent voters, who are the ones who seem to literally be running over to McCain, were on the fence, unconvinced and unmotivated, resigned as they were that this year was going to be a Democratic year. Not so! The Republican base is rallied, people have started to believe again.

It means something, it cannot be denied. And against all this, if I look at the way things are trending, all that Obama has done and is doing now, isn’t helping. He’s had a darn good run in the past five days, bashing McCain over the head with everything that has gone wrong economically speaking.

So let’s see what the Harbingers of Trends tell us at the end of the week. Say, next Monday and Tuesday. And I predict the following:

Obama will have been slamming McCain over the head with McCain’s signature weakness, the economy, for 1,5 weeks next week. If Obama hasn’t reversed trends in the Harbingers of Trends (and McCain isn’t caught with an underage boy on a toilet in Utah, or something similar), he will lose this election.

Why? Because it would mean that for all the want of change among the voters, and all their fears about the economy, they simply didn’t care. It would also mean the Great Failure of the Obama strategists, because it would mean that, in the end, the economy was not the electorate’s main concern after all.

A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.

That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”.  Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.

So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?

To paraphrase Lord Acton: “ideology blinds, and absolute ideology blinds absolutely.”

That is at the core of the question, when trying to analyze why voters deem Obama’s lack of experience a problem, but are less concerned about Palin’s lack of experience. I think the explanation for that is that people are more inclined to forgive candidates for a lack of experience, if those candidates candidly and forcefully prove that their are vehemently defending the ideas of those voters.

Months ago, I had a conversation with a hard-right American woman on some political discussion forum. When I asked her why she would never vote for Hillary Clinton, she literally said that “politics is not the place for women”. She said that women should be taking care of the family, making sure that the kids are healthy and the house is clean, etcetera.

However, shortly after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his veep, I saw a post of the woman on the discussion forum again – and she was thrilled by Palin, and she would go out to register, and vote for her. All the talk about how women should not be in politics was out the window, because Palin is backing the same hard-right, Christian ideology. (Minus the “women should stay at home” stuff, obviously.)

That threw me back to the 2000 election. I had many discussions with American voters then about their presumed choice for the presidency. I was aghast; quite a few of the people who said they’d be voting for Bush, didn’t really like his socio-economic agenda, but said they “had to” vote for Bush as he was the only candidate promoting a conservative Christian agenda. Some of these people had voted for Clinton in ’92 and ’96, but were finally turned off by the Lewinsky scandal.

They all acknowledged that Clinton’s economic policies had worked, and worked fabulously, and they acknowledged that Al Gore would probably continue those succesful policies. But it didn’t matter.

During the 2000 election campaign, experience was also an important factor. Al Gore had been vice-president for 8 years, and had served in the Senate for many years before that. Bush, despite having been governor of Texas, was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs. He proved it by a number of gaffes during interviews and debates. But it didn’t matter.

Bill Clinton, while on the stump for Gore, famously pressed the voters to “choose wisely”. Nonetheless, for those Americans, ideology trumped wisdom. They all voted Bush in the end.

At the end of 2003, I talked to some of the same people again. The disaster that was Bush’s economic and fiscal “policy” was clear, and these guys weren’t stupid. But I wasn’t surprised at all when they said that they would still be voting for Bush. They all believed that Kerry would be just as tough as Bush as commander in chief, so that wasn’t the problem. No, their problem with Kerry was that he wasn’t promoting a Christian-conservative agenda. And perhaps Bush could finally install a new conservative Supreme Justice in the Supreme Court during his second term. They were finally turned off when Bush botched that with his Harriet Miers nomination.

To Christian fundamentalist wingnuts like them, people like Sarah Palin can do no wrong. If today documents showed up which clearly show that Palin illegally deducted millions in tax expenes, if today someone reports that Palin once drowned a kitten, or if Palin today says that as president, she’d sell Alaska to Canada, they would still support her.

As for independent, not necessarily very religious women who are flocking to Palin: as some polls have shown, many are voting for her because she’s a woman. A fairly large number of women now view Palin as the torch bearer of the feminist struggle for equality. Some have, without blinking, switched from the quite liberal Hillary Clinton to the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin. I’m charging here, but that’s a bit like a cow preferring a butcher over a PETA volunteer to have as her new friend.

That aside, it’s quite ironic for them to vote for someone because of her gender. These women seem to be making the same mistake as the misogynists they’re fighting. Misogynists will not vote for a woman because she’s a woman. Feminists, who joined the struggle to fight for acceptance of equality between men and women, now say that they are voting for Palin because she’s a woman. Misogyny in reverse.

I wonder how these women sleep at night. Oh wait, I know – “ideology blinds, but absolute ideology blinds absolutely.” And that while darkness helps people get to sleep! Of course, how could I forget…

Time for Team Obama to turn the lights on McCain, while also asking Palin what exactly she thinks of the economic policies of George W. Bush. Does she support his policies, like McCain does? And how does she feel about the fact that McCain doesn’t agree with her view on abortion, which holds that abortion should never be allowed – even not in the case of incest or rape? Isn’t that a problem?

If the game of Team McCain is to paint Obama as “just another tax-and-spend liberal”, i.e. your average Democratic candidate and nothing special, then it is time for Team Obama to paint Palin for what she is: an ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican. And you do that not by accusing or pointing fingers, but by continuously asking questions via the media.

The answer is to question her.

But perhaps I was wrong. The tracking polls are starting to show dents in Obama’s armour. Over at Real Clear Politics (I’m always careful with these guys as they’re clearly pro-GOP), the latest rundown of tracking polls shows that although Obama is still leading, the margins seem to be getting smaller, not bigger.

That spells trouble for Obama. Of course, Americans being Americans, I would not be surprised if they once again elect someone who will tear their country even further apart. Because that’s what Republicans do: they pretend to be all Christian morals, but before you know it, they’re out with TV-ads calling people traitors and sodomizing your 3-year-old.

Either way, Obama has not yet been able to close the deal and I’m afraid that that’s because people are still very doubtful of him. Of course, American pigheads being American pigheads, they keep noticing that Obama is black. Perhaps that’s it. It can’t be because of ideological reasons. Because how many average Americans read candidate platforms these days?

I‘ve said from day one, so even before the primaries, that Americans were very capable of electing a carbon copy of George W Bush into office. I also predicted that the election would be very close.

When the new King of Expectation beat the Oracle of Chappaqua, I said I was convinced that any generic Republican would win the election. Now, I’m going back to that position. I’ll be keeping it until Obama truly starts improving his poll numbers and significantly moves away from McCain.