• Slate, Monday, November 3, 2008 10:45 AM

Heading into Election Day, Barack Obama appears to have it all sewn up. But what if he doesn't? If Obama loses, aside from one seriously shocked nation, would be an unprecedented fallout for media pundits and pollsters, nearly all of whom would be proven very wrong in their predictions.

All 159 major polls taken in the last six weeks have put Obama in the lead, and good luck finding a pundit on the Sunday morning news programs who didn't think Obama had this one well in hand. But nothing is finished yet, and if they turn out to be wrong, we could be looking at "such a blast of schadenfreude that Republicans like Rush Limbaugh would be struck speechless (another historic first)," writes John Dickerson.

Of course, the media knows this, so expect caution in their statements as they watch the polls come in. The debacle of 2000 is still fresh in the nation's memory.

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