Could This Be A Ten Point Race?

For the past year I've been saying that the Presidential wanted to be a 8-10 point Democrat win.  If you look at the structure underneath the candidates, the spread of the generic polls (D vs R) have been consistently 8-10 points, as has Party ID.  For the last several weeks a variety of factors seemed to be keeping the race closer to 5-7 points, and on Friday I made my official prediction we would end up 53-46. Throughout the Fall I've been saying that McCain would just to have to end up at 45-46 - it was just too hard to imagine Obama winning the race by more than 10 points in a 2 way race.  

But as I wrote over the weekend there is now evidence that in fact the election rather than tightening is breaking towards Obama, and that McCain is still - incredibly - not consistently polling in the mid 40s.   Yesterday's Gallup track found the generic Presidential number now at 53-41 - 12 points! - now similar to their spread among likely voters.   The question from the day Obama won the nomination was would this skinny bi-racial kid with a funny name whom few knew even two years ago be able to realize the structural potential of this race?

Increasingly it appears that yes indeed Senator Obama is seizing this historic moment, and in the process is ushering what may very well be a new and very 21st century Democratic era.