Just in time for the buildup to tonight’s VP debate, the word is out that the McCain campaign is bailing on Michigan, which had been showing swing just a week ago along with Minnesota & Wisconsin.

Rove & Company’s summary of the state of the electoral union as of yesterday shows a seriously weakening situation for McCain. Obama leads, albeit within a margin of error, in states that had been holding for McCain and without which McCain cannot win. Ohio, Virginia, and New Hampshire have joined Minnesota (which has tenaciously stayed out of McCain’s column). Florida and North Carolina are showing a dead heat.

Five-thirty-eight has a “Super Tracker” chart that looks like a stock chart and, while this is probably not a valid way to look at it, if it were a stock chart it would tell me that Obama has broken out strongly to the positive side, after bouncing off resistance at about -2% two weeks ago. The trend is almost vertical, and the projection has stayed almost identical. Nothing goes up forever, so one way or another this curve needs to flatten out if not turn and head McCain’s way.

To what we attribute the change in direction of the polling remains to be seen. It could be tonight’s debate or, more likely, some external event. Given the volatile economic and uncertain international environment, it feels like anything could happen. That said, unless something happens soon, speculation will turn to what the implications of an Obama blowout might be on Congressional and Senate races.

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John McCain showed up to defend Sarah Palin from the liberal media, and Katy Couric continues her ongoing interview of Palin on the campaign trail

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With all the attention on Palin, there has been very little on Biden. Biden has a tough row to hoe tonight, as my local eleven-year-old pointed out at breakfast this morning “I wouldn’t want to be Joe Biden tonight, because I’d have to make myself look stupid to avoid crushing Sarah Palin”.

Rachel Maddow talks about the unreliability of expectations and prognostications below. She won’t be surprised by a good Palin showing tonight.

Gwen Ifill, who moderated the VP debates last cycle, wrote a book that includes Barack Obama as an example of the progress that African Americans have made in America. The McCain campaign has been making a lot of noise in the last few days to the effect that she should be replaced. The point of that is not really to remove her, but to set up the spin room and the weekend chat following the debate.

If Palin manages to avoid babbling incoherently tonight she is going to look good relative to expectations. Expect the McCain campaign to come out with everything they’ve got to turn this debate into a trend changing event.

Biden is so unpredictable that anything could happen. One false move and Fox News will have the fodder they need to spend the next 96 hours making him the issue. The best advice I’ve heard for him was that he pretend Sarah Palin doesn’t exist and go after John McCain on foreign policy. If he can do this effectively, the perky Palin snark scheme might backfire.

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