As of this writing, my colleague Nate Silver’s election forecast has President Obama’s odds of re-election at 86 percent. The details of his famous forecasting method may be proprietary, but the argument, at this point, is straightforward: The President leads Mitt Romney by a small but solid margin in the state-level polling; that lead has been robust for weeks; state polling has historically been somewhat more accurate and currently provides a richer data set than the national polls where Romney’s numbers are slightly better; and the tight national polling could be consistent with an Obama electoral college win in any case. To pull the election out, Romney needs to win several states where the polls show him basically tied with the president (or even slightly behind, in some of the latest Virginia polling) and then win a state or two from a list (Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, longer shots like Pennsylvania) where the polling has never really shown him doing anything but trailing. This is possible but unlikely; it has grown more unlikely with every passing day; and now “time is up” and Obama’s victory is nearly certain.

This is a compelling way of looking at the election, but as my previous comments on the polls have suggested, I find some of the counter-arguments from commentators more bullish on Romney to be compelling as well. The reality is that at both the state level and nationally, there isn’t a single category called “the polls.” Instead, there are polls that assume the kind of demographic mix that the Obama campaign is confidently expecting, and polls that assume the whiter, older electorate that the Romney campaign insists we should expect — and while the reality might lie somewhere in between the two, it’s also possible that one of the models is simply much, much closer to the truth, and that the polling averages are giving undue weight to projections that are simply wrong. Or to bring things to a finer point, if the Gallup and Rasmussen assumptions about the likely shape of the electorate are right — and they’ve been close to right in the recent past — then Romney has a very good chance of winning this election, no matter what the RealClearPolitics polling average in Ohio says. And if the projections many pollsters are using for how closely Obama will match his 2008 turnout among young people, blacks, and Hispanics are off-base, then the president risks what Ben Domenech has termed an “undertow” election, in which the wave the White House is counting on drops out from under them instead.

I am not enough of a stathead to offer a data-rich case for the rosy Romney scenario, but I do have my own (hopefully somewhat well grounded) theories about how American politics work, and they incline me to believe in that scenario’s basic plausibility. In general, I think that the political class tends to overestimate the power of the Hispanic bloc, whose influence is growing more slowly than many pundits and strategists acknowledge. In general, I think that the political class tends to overestimate swing voters’ sympathy for strident social liberalism, and to imagine a lockstep support for legal abortion among female voters that doesn’t actually exist. In general, I think the political class tends to read unique political moments as permanent electoral shifts — which is why so many people who should have known better were talking about a semi-permanent Republican majority after 2004, and why so many people left the G.O.P. for dead after 2008. The Obama White House has built its campaign on these kind of premises: They’ve bet heavily on Hispanic turnout, bet heavily on their social issues strategy, and bet heavily on the idea that their 2008 “Hope and Change” coalition can be mostly recreated despite a more polarized environment, a disappointing record, and a mostly negative campaign. And I am highly skeptical of polling models that assume that all of these bets are about to mostly pay off.

Which is why, had the election been held a week ago, I would have joined the Michael Barones and George Wills and Karl Roves out on a limb and predicted a narrow Romney win. As of Halloween, my unscientific “model” ran as follows: A slight Romney lead in the national polls + my doubts about state-level polling + my general beliefs about the nature of American politics + some (no doubt selective) reading of the early vote tea leaves = Romney 50.5, Obama 49 in the popular vote, and an electoral map that looks something like this, with Romney-Ryan taking 295 electoral votes to Obama-Biden’s 243.

That outcome still seems plausible to me. But the national polls where Romney was clearly leading have moved slightly toward Obama in the past week — maybe because of Hurricane Sandy, maybe because of an inevitable tightening as Romney’s debate performances receded, maybe because of pollster clustering — and some of the Republican nominee’s best state polls shifted slightly as well. Rasmussen’s national tracking once had Romney at 50-46, but now it’s 49-48. Gallup consistently had Romney up by 4 points, but it’s one and only post-storm tracking poll has him winning by a narrow 49-48. In Ohio, Rasmussen went from 50-48 to 49-49 and the Ohio Poll went from 49-49 to an Obama lead of 1.5 points. Yes, this could just be statistical noise, and yes, the Gallup number is a four-day tracking poll that may capture an ephemeral post-hurricane bounce. But in a tighter-than-tight race, you have to take your evidence where you can find it: The mini-trend toward Obama is consistent across multiple Romney-friendly polls, it’s helped narrow the divide between the national average and the state averages to something more plausible than before, and it’s left the Republican-friendly model of how the election will turn out with less margin for error than it had a week ago. As I said above, I’m skeptical of just averaging polls when they’re working off such different models, but that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to just discount all the many polls showing Obama pulling out a narrow win. I can believe those polls are mostly wrong and the more Romney-friendly alternatives are mostly right, but there’s probably some wisdom in the crowd, and I’m not going to call it for Romney if the most favorable models in the public spread are only giving him a one-point national edge and a swing-state tie. To believe in Rasmussen and Gallup, I needed a cushion, and that cushion has mostly disappeared.

So my final, less-than-courageous prediction is that the swing states will, indeed, all be closer than the current averages suggest, and that Obama will only win those states where he’s leading by more than 2 points in the RealClearPolitics poll of polls, and that there will be one surprise where even a bigger lead isn’t safe … but the surprise will be Iowa rather than Wisconsin or Ohio or and Pennsylvania, and Obama will carry the electoral college by 271 to 267. And for the sake of the republic and all our sanity, I’ll give him a popular vote edge as well: Call it 49.7 to 49.2, the same half-percent margin that Gore enjoyed over Bush in 2000.

Again, a Romney victory would not surprise me in the slightest. Nor would a clear Obama electoral college win. I would be surprised to see Obama reach 51 percent, or Romney break 300 electoral votes. And whoever wins, I’m hoping for some map-scrambling (the Republicans trade Pennsylvania for Virginia, let’s say), some intrigue in rural Maine, and some shockingly close numbers in states that nobody has been watching, just to keep the pundits on our toes.

Give us a late and interesting night, America. But for the love of all that’s holy don’t give us a recount in Ohio.