Prediction: It's not even going to be close

where close means less than one percent of the popular vote, and less than 15 electoral votes.

But before Michelle Obama starts measuring the White House for new drapes, let's take a look at historical precedent.

The first Republican to win a presidential election was Abraham Lincoln. Since that initial success, the GOP has won 23 presidential elections compared to just 14 for the Democrats.

Since the Civil War only four Democrats -- Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt and Samuel Tilden -- have won a majority of the popular vote. (Tilden in 1876, lost the Electoral College vote and never became president.)

It has been 32 years since a Democrat won a majority of the popular vote. The last to do so was Carter, who won a whopping 50.1 percent of the votes in 1976. He defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Richard Nixon and carried the burden of Watergate and the Vietnam War into the election.

Obviously, 1976 was not a good year to be a Republican. Nixon's disgraceful resignation and reputation for deceit and corruption fatally wounded the Republican presidential ticket. But even with such enormous advantages on his side, Carter barely eked out a majority. Carter's once sizeable lead in the polls dwindled as election day drew near, so much so that some observers believe that had the election taken place a couple of weeks later, Ford might have prevailed.

Like the 1976 contest, all conditions point toward an easy Democratic victory this November. George W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, suffers from abysmal approval ratings -- below 30 percent in some polls. The economy is weak and appears to be entering a recession. And the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, while certainly something of a maverick, is quite close to the president on the one issue causing him the most damage -- the war in Iraq.

Yet right now in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up, McCain and Obama appear to be in a dead heat. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll shows Obama leading by 3 points; the latest Rasmussen tracking poll shows McCain up by 3. A McCain-Clinton match-up is also too close to call at this point. If this is a Democratic year, one wonders what a Republican year would look like.