Landslide?

If the election were held today, Barack Obama would win in a landslide, according to the polls.

The problem for Obama is that the election is not today and John McCain has until November 4 to convince Americans to vote for him instead.

But if you believe the polls, Obama and his Democratic running mate Joe Biden have made a dramatic turnaround from a month ago, when they were dropping in the polls after McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The latest survey of polls (shown above) from Real Clear Politics gives Obama 348 electoral votes with 190 for McCain. The map assumes there are no tossup states. Under that scenario, Obama wins all the battleground states except Missouri and Nevada.

Most importantly, Obama wins Florida and Ohio -- two key states that eluded Democrats in the past two elections -- in the scenario above.  If the Democratic ticket had carried either of those states in the 2004 election, John Kerry would have won the election. And of course, if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the counting of ballots in Florida in 2000, Al Gore could have won the electoral vote. Instead he lost Florida, and thus the presidency, by just 537 votes.

The Obama-Biden ticket would also take two key southern states, Virginia and North Carolina. Democrats haven't won North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and haven't won Virginia since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The changing map reflects a dramatic shift in the poll numbers the past few weeks, first registered in the national opinion surveys but now confirmed in the state-by-state polls. The shift comes just as the economy has become the dominant issue in the campaign, moving the debate away from McCain's perceived advantage on national security issues.

A new Quinnipiac University poll out today finds Obama leading McCain in several major battleground states. In Florida, Obama leads 51 to 43. In Ohio, Obama leads 50 to 42. And in Pennsylvania, Obama leads 54 to 39. As a result of those numbers, Obama has now taken the lead in the so-called "poll of polls" that combines the results of all the major opinion polls and averages them out for one result.

That puts McCain and Palin in a difficult position, as the campaign moves into October and just one day before the eagerly anticipated vice presidential debate in St. Louis on Thursday. It is possible that the polls are completely wrong, or they could change again before election day in November.

It's still too early to tell what will happen next month, and polls have been wrong before, but right now the polls show it's Obama's race to lose. And that could mean McCain, Palin and the Republicans will be on the attack with full force in the next 34 days.

(Editor's Note: Story updated October 2, 2008, 12:05 a.m.)