Apparently we don’t need to wait five days to find out who’ll be president for the next four years. All we need to do is check out, say, The Boston Herald, for a headline confidently proclaiming: “Romney set to win, maybe by a mile.” Or National Review Online, where we learn that “the size of Romney’s victory could be the biggest surprise of all.” Or The Wall Street Journal, where that most disinterested of political observers, Karl Rove, proclaims: “It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.” Then there’s The Hill, where Dick Morris prophecies, “Here comes the landslide.” And if we still have any lingering doubts—or fanciful hopes for President Obama—they will be shattered by UnSkewedPolls.com, which has “The Updated Definitive Projection of the race: Romney wins 54 percent and 359 EVs.”

If it weren’t bad enough that he’s become the face of leveraged buyouts, Mitt Romney is facing another fresh challenge in the next three primary and caucus states. As Arthur Delaney points out at Huffington Post, the first two states to vote for a GOP nominee have weathered the recession relatively well—a boon for the laissez-faire front-runner. It’s a different story in the next three: South Carolina and Florida, with 9.9 percent and 10 percent unemployment respectively, and Nevada, which tops the country in both unemployment (13 percent) and foreclosures (one of every 16 homes in 2011).