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THE POLLS TELL THIS REMARKABLE STORY: GOP presidential candidate John McCain badly miscalculated when on Sept. 24, in a huge roll of the dice, he said that he'd suspend his campaign the next day in order to bring Republicans and Democrats together to save our foundering financial system. This bit of braggadocio almost immediately cost McCain the lead he'd had over Democrat Barack Obama since the second week of September.

The public backlash against his grandstanding might strike some as too harsh. After all, every campaigning politician engages in over-the-top theatrics and woos naïve voters with exorbitant promises; Obama makes promises by litany.

But we can't recall any other instance in the long history of electoral politics where a candidate made a promise and then actually tried to make good on it prior to the election. This unusual misstep was worsened by McCain's failure to deliver the goods. He ended up looking more like Doodyville's Mayor Phineas T. Bluster than savvy professional gambler Bret Maverick.

As a result of his impolitic gamble, McCain lost the lead and then some. He now trails nationally by four to eight points, depending on the poll -- and by much larger margins in some key swing states.

"It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung so dramatically, so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign," says Peter Brown, assistant director of the respected Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

On Oct. 1, he wrote, "In the last 20 days, Sen. Obama has gone from seven points down to eight points up in Florida, while widening his lead to eight points in Ohio and 15 points in Pennsylvania." Brown says that no candidate has overcome such a dramatic reversal in the past 50 years.

OBAMA'S SURGE BEGAN IN ADVANCE OF the first candidates' debate on Sept. 26, ruling out that event as a defining moment. Shortly before the debate, statistician Nate Silver wrote on his political Website, Fivethirtyeight.com: Obama is in the strongest position in the polls he's been in all year. Silver, a young man famous for his work with baseball statistics, emerged this year as a leading expert on presidential polling. Although he unabashedly supports Obama, his mathematics embraces neutrality. He carefully weighs all of the major political polls to produce a snapshot of current voter sentiment and to predict voters' behavior on Nov. 4.

By Silver's calculations, Obama has the lead now in so many key states that it's hard to imagine him losing all of them by election day, even with Joe Biden as his running mate. Silver's Website attracts more than 200,000 visitors a day, including me. Recently, I've also begun visiting the Princeton Election Consortium site, maintained by Professor Sam Wang and statistician Andrew Ferguson (http://election.princeton.edu). It, too, tries to reduce multiple polls into simple cross-sections of voter sentiment. Unlike Silver, however, Wang and Ferguson are looking at the here and now, not trying to predict the outcome.

Silver's reading of the polls sees McCain hurt more by the financial crisis than by the debate or running-mate Sarah Palin's embarrassing interviews with ABC's Charles Gibson and CBS's Katie Couric.

MCCAIN WAS HURT by the poor economy even before he decided to "suspend" campaigning and rescue the country. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released three hours before McCain's decision to suspend found that 53% of the voters saw the economy as the most important campaign issue, up 12 points in two weeks. The heightened economic concern was largely due to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's controversial, three-page $700 billion bailout plan, which gave him more clout and a bigger budget than the leaders of most African countries. Call him Bwana.

The poll found that Obama had a 14-point lead over McCain in trustworthiness to deal with the economy, which may have influenced McCain's decision to rush to Washington and act like he was leading the charge up San Juan Hill. His bombastic arrival did light a fire under foot-dragging Democrats who couldn't countenance Maverick's getting any credit for a legislative breakthrough. But the public awarded him no brownie points.

A Gallup poll released on Oct. 1 indicates that McCain has narrowed Obama's lead from eight points to four, inside the margin of error. But state polls tell a different story. Quinnipiac on Oct. 1 found Obama gaining in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, while McCain saw his popularity drop significantly in these locales. So, if he's going to pull off an upset, McCain must work much harder in a lot more places before election day.

As of Friday morning, and thus after the vice-presidential debate, Silver saw Obama winning 331.2 electoral votes to McCain's 206.8. Wang and Ferguson were 95% sure that Obama would win 322 electoral votes, while McCain would get 216. To win, 270 are needed. If Maverick suspended his campaign on the advice of his aides, he got a bum steer.