Tomorrow marks four weeks until Election Day on Nov. 4. If you aren’t sick of phone calling and polling and television ads already, don’t worry: Your time is here.

Americans will be awash in all three of those things from now until the big night next month. If you’re lucky (or unlucky, as it were) enough to live in a battleground state, expect to be on both presidential candidates’ favorites lists. They’ll want to make sure they’re getting bulk minutes for all the time they’ll be spending calling you over the next month.

And a lot of those calls will have to do with polls. Either they’ll be calling to poll you, or they’ll be calling to tell you about a poll they’ve already done. If you’re a frequent voter—if you make it to the polls at least half the time, and especially if you make it to the polls more than three quarters of the time—then you’ll be getting these calls on a nightly basis.

So let’s talk about polls for a minute.

CNN released a new poll yesterday that says Barack Obama has doubled his lead over John McCain, from four points to eight points, since mid-September. He now leads McCain 53 to 45 percent. That’s outside the poll’s margin of error. Sounds good for Obama, right?

Well, maybe.

CBS has a poll that says the race is “tightening,” now at 47-43 in Obama’s favor. But with a margin of error of at least three points, McCain could be all but even in that poll of “likely voters.”

And that’s another thing: Your polling data is only as good or as strong as those you interview.

This poll is a national poll—meaning it gauges the popular vote. Never mind that it only incorporated the opinions of just slightly more than 1,000 people; anyone who remembers the 2000 election knows that the popular vote is like 2nd place in a beauty pageant: It’s nice to say you won, but it doesn’t mean much.

You remember from 2000 (if not from Mr. Andrews’ sixth-grade social studies class) that the president is elected by the Electoral College (hence, the name) by electoral votes (novel concept, right?). So the only polls that matter are those that consider the status of the state spreads.

... But not every state. Most are already won or lost by virtue of the political makeup of their populations. States with nearly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats and those with large concentrations of ticket-splitting voters (they vote for one party’s candidate at the top of the ticket, but they split support between downticket candidates) are known as battleground states. And if you live in a battleground state, ladies and gentlemen, congratulations; all that annoying attention you’ll be getting from the campaigns over the next four weeks is the price you have to pay for having your votes count a whole lot more than that of those who languish in dark states, red and blue alike.

So it is the burgeoning catalog of battleground polls, not the national opinion poll, that matters. Maybe that means better news for McCain?

Not so much.

The newest set of Fox News/Rasmussen Reports polls show that Obama has posted big gains in Colorado, Missouri and Florida, while McCain has failed to gain any ground in Ohio and Virginia.

As Fox News points out, all five states were won by George W. Bush in 2004. But Obama now holds at least a modest edge in four of the five states and is essentially even in Ohio.

Over the past two weeks, since the collapse of the mortgage industry began dominating national and international news, McCain has gone from one point down to six points down in Colorado and from up five to down three in Missouri.

The worst news comes from Florida, where McCain gone from five points up two weeks ago to seven points behind. 

Obama has edged ahead by two points in Virginia, and McCain leads by just one in Ohio. But both states are within the margin of error.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for the McCain campaign in tonight’s presidential debate, the second of three in the series. Tonight’s event will feature the town hall-style format, which plays to McCain’s strengths, and the hall in Nashville will be filled with mostly undecided voters.

McCain couldn’t ask for better circumstances in which to make his case to the nation.

Considering the battleground polls, he’s probably hoping his big chance hasn’t come too late.

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