Mark Nickolas at the Huffington Post does some of the math that I'd been meaning to do if I could find the time to dig through data and make fancy charts. He takes a look at popular vote and electoral vote margins from the last 20 elections to answer the media talking heads' question about why, if the public is so upset with the current Republican administration, the race is so close.

The answer: It's not. Everyone seems fixated on national tracking polls (that have consistently shown Obama leading, even if only by a few points) when they should be paying attention to state polls and, more importantly, the electoral vote predictions. Virtually every EV projection has Obama winning comfortably. That could obviously change in the next few months, but as the race currently stands, here's what we're looking at (270 votes are needed to win):

FiveThirtyEight: Obama 296, McCain 242
RealClearPolitics (w/ tossups): Obama 238, McCain 163, Tossups 137
RealClearPolitics (no tossups): Obama 322, McCain 216
Pollster: Obama 284, McCain 157, Tossups 97

Even the seemingly small margins in the national polls are more significant than they appear. Clinton won the popular vote by 5.6 percentage points in 1992, and had an electoral college margin of 202.

But the media has a vested interest in a close race—no one wants to watch nonstop punditry about a lopsided election. It's difficult to distinguish deliberate misrepresentation from incompetence/laziness with today's journalists. Are they deliberately portraying it as close to keep the public interested? Or do the daily tracking polls just offer them an easy way out of a real analysis of the race?

Because at this point, it's not a horse race. The dynamics could change and the election could tighten or even swing considerably in McCain's favor—it's happened before. But until the numbers drastically change, the general election looks like won't be nearly as competitive as the Democratic primary.

I like to use the analogy of last year's Major League Baseball playoffs, where the championship was effectively decided in the ALCS. The Colorado Rockies got hot at the end of the season and had a relatively easy path to the World Series, winning 21 of 22 games, but they were ultimately a weaker team than whatever the American League threw at them. The American League playoffs looked a little more like this year's Democratic primary, with the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians battling it in an exciting, back-and-forth seven game series. The actual World Series was a fairly boring sweep.