Out of the last turn and down the stretch!

Less than a week to go. I suppose there have been stranger home stretches. Maybe the year Perot was in the mix. But between half-hour infomercials, the Joe the Plumber Express – c’mon guys, wtf? – the mavericky diva, Tina Fey, Al Franken, Ted Stevens, Michele Bachmann, John Murtha, the Bradley effect, and so on …. Well, it’ll be over soon.

Here’s where it stands. Polls are showing some tightening over all, but Obama is on offense, fully funded and with a heavily manned field operation; he is winning over suburban voters and other unaffiliated and swing voters; plus he has a base strategy a la Rove’s Dubya 2 campaign.

The polling and McCain’s dwindling resources have dictated a focused strategy for his campaign. Here’s what Karl Rove’s website has to say as of tonight:

National polls have started to show the presidential race tightening, but 66 state polls released so far this week haven’t captured any significant movement toward John McCain. In fact, since Sunday, Nevada (5 EV) has flipped from toss-up to Obama, giving him 311 electoral votes to McCain’s 157, with 70 as a toss-up. McCain still needs to pick up all of the current toss-up states—which all went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004—and peel off several large states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia from Obama.

The Rove & Company map shows Montana, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Florida as the toss-ups.

FiveThirtyEight proprietor and newly minted media guru Nate Silver’s Senate pie chart is showing 57 Senate seats at the moment going to the Democratic caucus; plus the unaffiliated (read socialist) Bernie Saunders making it 58; and excluding Joe Lieberman who will probably be caucusing with the Republicans, if you believe Senator Ensign.

Four of Connecticut’s five Congressional races are polling roughly as follows: CT05 – somewhere between “over” and a landslide for incumbent Chris Murphy; CT02 – challenger Sullivan is toast as Courtney turns a paper-thin win in ’06 into a safe seat; CT01 & CT03 – only token opposition to begin with; and a race that will be watched by everybody who watches this stuff, CT04. Himes and Shays in a dead heat, with Shays trying not to make any mistakes, and Himes trying to find some way to shake things up in the closing lengths.

Sources: Karl Rove & Company; FiveThirtyEight.