Below The Beltway

John McCain claimed yesterday that he doesn’t believe the polls and thinks he can still win the Election.

Well, to quote a great man, facts are stubborn things and the facts today indicate that the likelihood of John McCain winning this election is slimmer now than it has ever been.

The Rasmussen Poll, for example, shows Obama with a five-point lead over McCain:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows Barack Obama attracting 51% of the vote while John McCain earns 46%. Obama’s five-point advantage is down from an eight-point lead yesterday but up a point from the lead he held a week ago. With today’s results, Obama has been ahead by four-to-eight points every single day for 32 straight days

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During that 32-day stretch, Obama’s voter support has stayed between 50% and 52% every day while McCain has stayed in the 44% to 46% range.

Over at the Gallup Daily tracking poll, Obama has a lead ranging between five and ten percent depending on which set of voters you look at:

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Friday through Sunday finds Barack Obama with a five percentage point lead over John McCain, 50% to 45%, in the presidential preferences of likely voters using Gallup’s traditional model. He enjoys a more ample 10-point lead, 53% to 43%, using Gallup’s expanded model.

Today’s traditional likely voters result, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Oct. 24-26, is identical to that reported on Sunday. Obama’s five-point advantage falls at the midpoint of the lead he has held with this voter model over the past nine days, ranging from three to seven points.

Obama’s 10-point lead among expanded likely voters matches his largest leads on this basis. It also ties his standing among all registered voters, who now favor Obama over McCain, 52% to 42%

More important for McCain, though, is the fact that history is now against him:

PRINCETON, NJ — There have been only 2 instances in the past 14 elections, from 1952 to 2004, when the presidential candidate ahead in Gallup polling a week or so before the election did not win the national popular vote: in 2000 (George W. Bush) and 1980 (Jimmy Carter). And in only one of these, in 1980, did the candidate who was behind (Ronald Reagan) pull ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College and thus win the election.

The 1980 example is not necessarily one that John McCain can hope is duplicated this year. Reagan’s late-breaking surge that year is generally attributed to the only presidential debate between Carter and Reagan — held one week before the election, on Oct. 28 — which seemed to move voter preferences in Reagan’s direction, as well as the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, which reached its one-year anniversary on Election Day. After trailing Carter by 8 points among registered voters (and by 3 points among likely voters) right before their debate, Reagan moved into a 3-point lead among likely voters immediately afterward, and he won the Nov. 4 election by 10 points.

The 2000 example may have greater similarities to the kind of upset McCain hopes to achieve. Despite Bush’s generally leading position for much of the last month prior to the 2000 election, the race narrowed in the final few days, and Gore squeaked out a popular-vote victory, 48.4% to 47.9%. Of course, Gore failed to win the Electoral College vote and, thus, the election.

Translation — even McCain’s best case scenario may mean that he’ll end up being another Al Gore.