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The road to victory for John McCain is in danger of turning into a dead end.

With rival Barack Obama's lead in the polls widening rather than narrowing, with early voting clearly favouring the Democrats and with too little money to defend too many states, the challenge for the Republican presidential nominee appears to be virtually insurmountable.

In politics, nothing is inevitable. But the odds of a McCain victory are so long, they're at risk of disappearing over the horizon.

Traditionally, polls narrow in the final weeks of an election campaign, as the front-runner feels the effects of the challenger's attacks. This year, the opposite is happening.

The RealClearPolitics compendium of national polls had Mr. Obama ahead by an aggregate of 7.6 per cent on Friday. A week ago, his lead was 6.7 per cent.

Far more important, Mr. Obama is posting some impressive numbers at the state level. Not only does he lead in every state taken by John Kerry in 2004, he also continues to lead in every traditional battleground state except Indiana, and two polls released this week have him ahead in the Hoosier State. (Battleground states are states in which, traditionally, both parties have been competitive.) The RealClearPolitics electoral projection map now has Mr. Obama with 255 solid electoral college votes, only 15 shy of the 270 votes needed to win the election. When solid and leaning Democratic states are combined, Mr. Obama's total rises to 306 votes – a comfortable Democratic victory. Mr. McCain, on the other hand, has only 137 electoral college votes, with another 20 leaning his way. The RCP map includes seven toss-up states, including Florida, where neither side has a clear advantage.

Mr. Obama seems certain to take Iowa from Mr. McCain; his aggregate lead there is 11.4 per cent. New Mexico, with an aggregate lead of better than 8 per cent, is almost equally safe.

That means Mr. Obama needs to win only one more battleground state to reach the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory. It could come in Colorado, where Mr. Obama's aggregate lead is more than five points, or Ohio, where it's now more than six points.

But it is most likely to come in Virginia, where Mr. Obama is ahead by seven points. Unlike Ohio, the Old Dominion has been safely Republican for decades, which means the Republicans don't have a sophisticated get-out-the-vote machine there; in the past, none was needed.

But the rapid population growth in northern Virginia, which has become part of suburban and exurban Washington, has turned the state increasingly blue.

And Mr. Obama has invested heavily there, outspending Mr. McCain by 3 to 1 in advertising. He has 51 field offices in the state, compared with Mr. McCain's 19.

In virtually every battleground state in the nation, local media report a Democratic machine that is far more sophisticated than its Republican counterpart, fuelled by the $618-million that Mr. Obama has raised thus far, and by the thousands of enthusiastic volunteers who have joined Mr. Obama's campaign.

That machine is already producing results. Fearing long lines and delays on election day – which can cause first-time and less affluent voters to abandon the effort – Mr. Obama has been urging his supporters to vote early. Most states now permit voting in advance or by mail. Early voters are expected to make up a third of ballots cast.

In North Carolina, African Americans make up 21 per cent of the population. They constituted only 19 per cent of the state's vote in 2004. This year, they constitute 31 per cent of the early voting. Polls show that more than nine out of 10 African Americans support Mr. Obama.

(Some states require voters to declare their race on their registration form, and release data on which registered voters have cast ballots, though the ballot itself remains secret and is not counted until election day.)

Nate Silver – who weights polls by their accuracy in past elections and runs simulations, posting the results at fivethirtyeight.com – rates Mr. Obama's chances of victory at 96.3 per cent, to 3.7 per cent for Mr. McCain. Intrade, an Internet trading market, puts the odds at 86.8 to 13.7.

“It's as bad as it looks” for Mr. McCain, Mr. Silver said Friday. “For the most part, it's a dire situation.”

The only hope for Mr. McCain, he believes, is “that something happens in the last week of the campaign” so enormous that it causes millions of voters to change their minds. A new war, perhaps, or a major scandal surrounding Mr. Obama.

Mr. McCain is in these straits because key groups of voters he had hoped to bring over to his side have instead migrated to Mr. Obama. One group is Latinos. President George W. Bush worked hard to increase the Latino vote, getting it up to 44 per cent for his party in 2004. Mr. McCain's strong support for immigration reform, and long-standing tensions between the Latino and African American communities, stoked GOP hopes that Mr. McCain would repeat, or even improve on, those results.

Instead, according to Gallup, only 26 per cent of Latinos say they plan to vote Republican, which explains why Mr. McCain is in so much trouble in places such as New Mexico and Nevada.

On another front, Jewish voters have overcome their concerns that Mr. Obama is not sufficiently pro-Israel, and now support him 3 to 1.

Even rural voters, the conservative core of the Republican Party, are abandoning Mr. McCain. The Denver Post published a poll this week that declared Mr. Obama had 46 per cent of the rural vote in 13 battleground states surveyed, to 45 per cent for Mr. McCain. If that result is accurate, and holds up for 10 more days, we're looking at a landslide.

Even Mr. McCain's secret weapon, Sarah Palin, ended up shooting him in the foot. The Republican vice-presidential nominee continues to energize the base of the party with her appeal to “real America” values. But in an ABC News poll this week, 52 per cent of likely voters said they were less likely to vote for Mr. McCain because of his choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate.

So what would it take to turn this article into a Dewey Beats Truman embarrassment? Well, a repeat of that epic 1948 presidential election.

“The balance of opinion could change, as it has several times in this campaign, and as it has in the past,” Michael Barone, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a recent analysis.

He noted that the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey was five points ahead of the Democratic president in the last week of the 1948 election campaign, prompting the only pollster, George Gallup, to quit polling. Harry Truman, of course, won.

Many analysts believe the pollster's methodology was flawed. But “Gallup may well have gotten it right when in the field; opinion could just have changed,” Mr. Barone concluded.

For that to happen again, however, one of Mr. Silver's Democratic disaster scenarios would probably have to unfold.

The only alternative would be a massive last-minute swing among white voters who discover they just can't bring themselves to vote for an African American. A New York Times/CBS poll this week showed one-third of voters said they knew someone who would not vote for Mr. Obama because he is black. If they were all actually talking about themselves, then that could be a problem for Mr. Obama.

But remember, latent racism would have to defeat Mr. Obama in every battleground state, without exception, for Mr. McCain to win. Remember also that the universe of battleground states is steadily expanding.

In the past two weeks, polls have shown Mr. Obama closing the gap in such improbable states as West Virginia, Georgia, North Dakota and Montana.

Mr. McCain will have to either divert some of his limited resources to these states to shore up support, or simply hope for the best.

The Denver Post reports that Mr. McCain cut in half his spending on television advertising in Colorado this week, compared with the week before.

There is hardly unanimity of opinion that Mr. McCain's cause is close to hopeless. The conservative pundit Dick Morris believes that, with his accusation that Mr. Obama would force Joe the Plumber to “spread the wealth,” Mr. McCain has found his most effective weapon.

“McCain has his best ad on his best issue,” he wrote Thursday. “… If the Republicans can get traction, it could become a competitive contest again.”

Ten days.