This could become a different race if Paul Ryan busts a move to "Canned Heat" sometime today.

Inappropriate Campaign Songs
Great Moments in TV Elections
The Greatest Movie Speeches

---

If you've been paying attention to the political pundit class lately, you know there's been a weird backlash in some sectors against Nate Silver, the math whiz behind the FiveThirtyEight blog, who has since early summer been predicting a better than 60-percent probability of an Obama win. (He currently has Obama's chances of reelection at 90 percent.) Over the past couple of weeks, many Republican observers have insisted that Mr. Silver is biased, that his model is skewed, that his projection of a big Obama win runs contrary to their impression that the race is a "toss-up."

Here's a sop to the anti-Silverites. Let's throw out all that complicated averaging and math and science, and instead predict the outcome of the election based on something everyone can grasp: movies. Political elections have been a popular film topic for years, so I decided to take a look at what these fictional elections could tell us about how things are going to go today. Pick one of the eight films below at random, and voila, the election results shall be known.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.