A landslide is a sure thing? Hardly.

The headlines leading up to tonight's presidential debate hint at the worst for John McCain:

McCain enters 'last chance saloon' in final debate

In Final Debate, Can McCain Rattle an Imperturbable Foe?

McCain may have last chance to overcome economy in final debate

In short, a lot of pundits are asserting that this is McCain's last chance to close the sizeable gap seen in the polls and stop Obama's electoral tsunami.

But is the gap really as big as everyone thinks it is?

At first glance, the national political mood certainly seems bad for Team McCain. A New York Times/CBS poll released recently showed Obama with a 14-point lead. Furthermore, many Electoral College projection maps show Obama pulling in more than 300 electoral votes. (All you need is 270 to win; anything more than 300 in today's divided political climate is a rout.)

Fivethirtyeight.com.

Pollster.com.

But there are some grains of salt to be had here.

First, about the NYT/CBS poll -- Nate Silver, the sports-analyst-turned-election-prognosticator, points out something important:

Presently, our best estimate is that Obama has about an 8-point national lead. However, CBS polls have leaned about 3 points more Democratic than the average this year. In other words, our baseline expectation is that a CBS poll should be showing about an 11-point for Obama right now.

In other words, the NYT/CBS poll is an outlier. It has been an outlier throughout the election season and Silver thinks it continues to be one now.

Individual polls with seemingly inflated numbers are one thing, but what about the overall lead in the national polls? Yahoo's own political dashboard (that averages reported poll results) also shows the 8-point averaged lead Silver is talking about. But when you dig into our map, you see that some of the states that are showing blue on the map are actually a lot closer than that blue implies.

A perfect example of this: North Carolina.

Our map shows North Carolina crosshatched in blue, indicating it's leaning Obama. Well, that lean (and North Carolina's 15 electoral votes that go with it) are based off of a 1% averaged poll lead. That's within most margins of error, which run anywhere from 2 to 4 points.

North Carolina poll trending since August

Two things could happen that wipe away those blue electoral votes: The polls could be wrong (New Hampshire primary, anyone?) or people could just simply change their minds. That's not out of the realm of possibility -- North Carolina has been safe McCain territory until late September.

And, there are at least eight other swing states -- including biggies like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia -- that are within McCain striking distance. Their current polls may not be as close as North Carolina, but they definitely aren't behind by the 14 points the NYT/CBS poll shows nationally either.

Swing states are aptly named. They swing. Call me Captain Obvious, but what it's really going to come down to is how these battleground states break on D-Day.

D.C. pundit king and NBC Political Director Chuck Todd has a fantastic, realistic breakdown of the electoral college map this morning on The Today Show.

He calls the map "difficult, but doable" for McCain, showing the 111 electoral votes up for grabs in 8 battleground states. The short of it is, if any of those states go for Obama, Obama wins.

This explains why the punditocracy thinks an Obama win is likely, but it certainly doesn't make a landslide a sure thing.