.@joenbc: If you think it’s a toss-up, let’s bet. If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 1, 2012

From Nate Silver’s latest examination of the polling:

Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.

But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent. Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast.

Blumenthal considers the chances of polling error:

The probability of an Obama lead in the key battleground states is very high, given that virtually all polling in these states shows him ahead. However, the potential for a rare “black swan” polling failure as big as the national polls of 1980 or 1992 is still real, given past experience — amounting to a roughly 1-in-3 chance that such an error would affect the outcome of states like Ohio and Iowa.