Perhaps you've seen it. You're at somebody's house, a party, a bar, whatever, when somebody disappears for a moment or two. Maybe it's a smoking break, you ponder. Five to ten minutes later, they come back, muttering under their breath; you can only catch certain words and phrases: "Rasmussen down by two", "call those internal crosstabs fairly weighted?" and "Zogby couldn't even place a may pole properly."

Sad to say, my friends, this person has come down with a severe case of Poll Fever (closely related to the disease "When-Oh-God-When-Will-This-Election-Enditis"). Luckily, the stricken case will probably recover after November 4th, but until then, you need to be prepared for the major symptoms:

• A need to be around a computer at certain times of the day.
• Knowing exactly when R2K, Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, announce their polls, and refreshing Drudge at six every evening to see if the Zogby has leaked a good McCain result.
• Sarcastic asides that if Pennsylvania is still considered a battleground state, then so is Kansas.
• A need to cry out "Why can't they hold this thing today and be done with it?" during days of fluctuation.
• A rash that mirrors the Gallup tracking poll, complete with roll-off and roll-on of new dates (in major cases).

If you are suffering, then please, think of your loved ones. And try and not make too much of a big deal of a point decrease in Ohio.

The ritual is almost comedic at this point. The polls come out at roughly the same time every day (this is altered for us here in the UK right now as we've moved our clocks back); if the poll is good for the Democrats, Republican sites rip the internals apart claiming that there's no way there's that many pinko-communists in America, whereas a good McCain day in a tracker poll makes half of DailyKos take to their office ledges.

But it's almost here now. Less than a week to go, and the Democrats still have a decent lead in the national tracking polls plus a commanding lead in the state polls. Early voting in Southern states appears to be going through the roof (as does the African-American vote), and Senator Ted Stevens can't vote for himself, being a convicted felon and all. Mind you, as we've seen so many times, never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot.

Meanwhile, Obama has just admitted what we knew all along. He is indeed a Communist sleeper agent:

In other news: what we learn from all this is that Andrew Sachs doesn't check his answerphone regularly. And that I don't understand how my country works half the time.