Yesterday’s Battleground poll had Obama up by only 1 percent. Today it’s 2 percent, 49-47.

There’s been an interesting phenomenon at work lately when I post about polling news that makes the race appear not quite so dire for McCain. I’ve written that the Republican ticket faces an uphill climb. I’ve pointed to “astonishingly ominous indicators for GOP prospects.” I’ve been told never to give a pep talk to a guy standing on a ledge.

And yet some liberal readers are driven into a fury each time I point to something that suggests their guy might not win, or might not win by a landslide. And it’s clearly ratcheted up in recent days.

Kos himself felt the need to snicker at the post about the Nickelodeon poll. Now, in that post, I pointed out how far the Nick poll’s margin had been from actual results for the past four cycles. I didn’t say that it was an ironclad guarantee of the outcome, but that a poll of children might give a sense of what they were hearing at the dinner table from their parents. That point was echoed by that noted right-wing propagandist Linda Ellerbee at Nickelodeon. (Anybody else got a theory on why a poll of children puts Obama up, 51-49? Some pro-McCain messages in SpongeBob SquarePants or something?) And if I’m silly for putting up a post about the Nick poll, how about… Daily Kos diarists? Or the Washington Post?

So what’s going on here? These folks are who they are; I’m not expecting discourse beyond their usual “YOU SUCK” level. But why are they so bothered by one guy saying that a landslide isn’t inevitable? Why does “your guy might not win” send them into paroxysms of rage?