Ignore the daily Gallup and Rasmussen polls that are showing that the race is a tie, or even that McCain is slightly ahead. Despite the solid trends, state-by-state polls show McCain still losing in the Electoral College.

By taking a look at Electoral-Vote.com, the best collection of polling, it is pretty clear where the race now stands. McCain is barely behind in Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. If he could pull ahead in these states and hold on to where he now leads (a big “if”), he is at 270 electoral votes.

At first glance, the biggest problem for McCain would seem to be that it is in precisely these states where Democratic Senate candidates are enjoying landslide leads. Aren’t they going to drive voter turnout?

Maybe not. This is where this year’s Democratic strength and the fear of single party rule in the Congress and the White House might trigger a wave of ticket-splitting, and thereby help McCain win.

Most students of ticket splitting will tell you I’m wrong. In recent years, many academics have assumed that gerrymandering and the rise of the Republican South have led to a permanent decline in ticket-splitting and party polarization. See this article in the Washington Post, for example, that looks at the tiny amount of ticket-splitting in 2004. On the other hand, most of these studies look at House races, which have become far more polarized and don’t tell us very much This very dry paper by a Yale graduate student demonstrates that, when it comes to Senate voting during presidential elections, the pattern is less predictable and has little to do with the South, incumbency, or ideology. Instead, Senate ticket splitting increases when a larger proportion of the population feels it is politically independent.

Could that sense of political independence be strong in Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire this year? If so, the map for McCain could still be promising.