As I write this, liberals everywhere are panicking. A Pew poll released on October 8 had Mitt Romney up 4 percent over Barack Obama nationally. A national Gallup tracking poll of likely voters had Romney up 2 percent. And everywhere—on Twitter, on progressive blogs, even in what we laughably used to call "the real world" before the internet snaked through our phones and ate our brains—Democrats are ready to call the race in favor of the opposition.

For instance, Andrew Sullivan turned into a giant wailing babyman on his blog, pronouncing that at the end of the first (admittedly disastrous) presidential debate, President Obama "instantly plummeted into near-oblivion," whatever the fuck that means. After writing that post, Sullivan clambered into his crib and cried himself to sleep in his little footie pajamas. Because Andrew Sullivan is a mewling fucking coward—and you are, too, if you're panicking right now.

Here's the thing. You can't stake your emotions on a single poll. Hell, you can't stake your emotions on seven polls. A poll is a photograph, a snapshot in time. Like a movie, you have to assemble many of those photographs together, in successive order, to create a narrative. Keep reading Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times, keep reading the Monte Carlo poll simulations that Darryl Holman at Horse's Ass has been running (Holman actually predicted the outcome of the 2008 presidential election with greater accuracy than Silver, missing only that bonus electoral vote that Obama picked up in Nebraska), and you understand that no single poll can predict the outcome of the election.

And let's look at history...

(Keep reading.)