The polls give Barack Obama such a big lead that even Republicans are talking about John McCain "in the past tense," said Adam Nagourney in The New York Times. "But is it really over?" GOP strategists, and even some Democrats, say McCain still has "a viable path to victory" if he can reel back Republican states slipping to Obama, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina.
"A come-from-behind surge could still propel John McCain to victory," said Kenneth Bunting in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but that's highly unlikely. It "might take a big event of unimaginable impact, some mysterious phenomenon pollsters can't measure or a suddenly brilliant strategic shift by a Republican campaign that in recent weeks has committed one myopic miscalculation after another."
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It's not hard to imagine a "McCain upset," said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Senior citizens might turn out in record numbers to "vote for the older guy," or McCain could find traction on the issue of taxes. The "Obama love" out there is deep, but McCain has 43 percent of the country pulling for him, and "nobody in politics has so repeatedly relished coming back from the dead."