The McCain camp held a conference call to discuss the state of polling. For political junkies it’s just fascinating stuff. They made several points.

First, the recent ABC poll, they believe, is an outlier based on a 16-point gap in voter identification (the difference in percentage of registered Democrats and Republican voters) which is more than three times the largest difference we have had in decades.

Second, they consider this a “margin of error”(MOE) race both nationally and in twelve states in play (taking those states off the RealClearPoliticscom’s list of states within the MOE). They also pointed to new battleground polling. which bears out their MOE theory of the race.

Third, because McCain “over-performs” above GOP voter ID, they believe they can still win if the voter i.d. gap on election day is 6-8% in the Democrats’ favor.

Fourth, they think McCain’s populist economic message is “working” and that we’ll see more of it as a result.

Fifth, 125 million people similar to what we saw in 1960 will turn out and no one is certain who they will be.

Finally, the period of the debates is a “black hole” which will shake up the race — maybe tipping it one direction and maybe not.

To boil it down: if the voter ID is not too much worse than 2000 or 2004 and the debates don’t fundamentally tip the race to Barack Obama, then the McCain camp is in good shape. If the debates do for Obama what they did for Ronald Reagan (provide a tipping point) or the Obama team has substantially altered historic voter ID numbers then Obama is in fine shape.

My own take: it is remarkable this is not going a lot worse for McCain. The one truism from a campaign filled with junk conventional wisdom: McCain is likely the only Republican who could win. Doesn’t mean he’s going to, though.