What are we looking for?

We're all polling experts now. We know about Zogby's oversampling of Republicans, we know which poll aggregators we trust, and at what time Gallup releases its latest tracking poll (expanded tracking poll, thank you very much). Now what does all of this mean????

Fortunately, smarter brains than mine are able to parse out the thousands of election scenarios and boil things down to a few key points. I speak, naturally, of Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, who says:

This is beginning to look like a five-state election. Those states are Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada. Essentially all relevant electoral scenarios involve some combination of these five states.