Good Monday morning. How much will TBS executives have to beg Major League Baseball to keep their contract for next year's playoffs? There were a lot of angry Red Sox fans on Saturday night. We wouldn't dream of speculating how many angry Red Sox fans there are this morning. (Too soon?) Here's what Washington is watching today:

-- The calendar! With just fifteen days left before November 4, both parties are making their final investment decisions, preparing for critical get-out-the-vote operations and moving staffers from every other department to the field side. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush and the Democratic nominee entered the final two weeks with few points separating the contenders, and superior Republican field operations gave Bush the win. This year, the parties find themselves in very different positions.

-- This time, Barack Obama holds a five-point lead in the latest RCP Average nationally, but on a state-wide level the picture looks dramatically worse for McCain. Obama has healthy leads in every state John Kerry won in 2004, which give him a good start of 252 electoral votes, and small leads in Iowa and New Mexico, two states that voted for Al Gore in 2000 and President Bush four years later, adding another 12 to the total.

-- Not content with 264 electoral votes, Obama also sports small but significant leads in Colorado and Virginia, two states that voted Bush twice. Colorado, with a growing population of Hispanics and a crush of new residents moving in from across the country, has been slowly trending Democratic for a decade. Virginia is a different story. The commonwealth isn't loathe to elect Democrats to federal office -- see Chuck Robb's win in a 1994 Senate race -- but the rapidly expanding Northern Virginia suburbs have made the state winnable on a presidential level, giving Democrats an in to the very heart of Republican territory.

-- That's not the only place John McCain needs to worry about skipping out on the GOP ticket. The swing states that one can't categorize as safely on one side or the other include Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida, six states that all voted for President Bush twice. Indiana and North Carolina are solidly Republican in an ordinary year, but this is no ordinary year. By the way, that list does not include West Virginia and North Dakota, two states that would easily vote Republican all things being equal but that may now rank as toss-ups.

-- And the news keeps getting worse for Republicans. This weekend, Obama won backing from General Colin Powell, who called the Illinois Democrat a "transformational" figure while simultaneously laying in to his old friend John McCain's campaign as below the belt, and into Sarah Palin as unqualified to be president should the worst occur. Appearing on Meet the Press, Powell's case for Obama, and case against McCain, could be broadcast endlessly on a loop for undecided voters who respect the retired Secretary of State. Democrats sought to portray the nod as the final nail in the coffin, and while that may be an overstatement, it's a story that can stick in voters' minds.

-- Elsewhere for the Republican Party, the news doesn't get much better. Democrats are outraising and outspending the GOP at every turn, and it's starting to pay off. True, Republicans had only a few Democratic Senate seats to target as this cycle began, but now they have almost none, and the top ten Senate seats most likely to change hands are all Republican-held. Democrat Mary Landrieu is the only member of her party in any trouble at all, and even she's looking safer by the day.

-- On the House side, Republicans closed the massive fundraising gap by securing an $8 million loan to finance their last-minute independent expenditure ads. So Democrats widened the gap by taking out a record-breaking $15 million loan. We'll find out today just how big the financial disparity between the two committees will be, but the difference between Democratic and Republican bank accounts and what they spent last month is likely to be close to $50 million. Add in that Democrats are now taking serious looks at Republican seats held by Reps. Henry Brown of South Carolina, Brian Bilbray of California and Tom Latham of Iowa -- all of whom are the heavy favorites to win re-election -- and one gets the sense that Nancy Pelosi's prediction of a 250-seat majority is a bit of an underestimate.

-- Bottom Line Of The Day: We didn't even mention that Obama beat the pants off of those who expected him to raise $100 million between September and Election Day. Instead, the Illinois senator pulled in an astounding $150 million in September alone, leaving him in prime position to outspend McCain and the national Republican Party by a two-to-one or wider margin. Add that to a general landscape that favors Democrats, an electoral map that puts only Republican states in play and a sense of momentum that only seems to grow by the day and it's going to be very hard for Republicans to find anything to brag about on November 5. McCain's chances are not dead -- far from it -- but fifteen days before Election Day, he and his fellow Republicans should recognize how steep their climb will be.

-- Today On The Trail: McCain kicks off his day with a rally in St. Charles, Missouri before heading to events in Columbia and Belton. Obama kicks off early voting in the Sunshine State with stops in Tampa and in Orlando, where Hillary Clinton will join him. Sarah Palin is on the trail in Colorado Springs, Loveland and Grand Junction, Colorado, while Joe Biden is in Seattle to raise money for the Democratic ticket.