Laura's Election Notebook

Weekend of 1st and 2nd November 2008. by Laura Kuenssberg

So after one of the longest, and certainly the most expensive campaigns in the history of political campaigning, this is it.

The coverage of this extraordinary day has reached its height and over the weekend, the big boys of the political Sunday shows were in their element.

The Daily Politics spent the morning behind the scenes with one of them, This Week (theirs not ours!). Their pundit in chief, "George Stephanopoulos"told me this election has been the 'campaign of a lifetime' - more than historic.

Fascinatingly, the show's preoccupation was not who would win, could Mccain stage a late surge? or even what would Obama do if he wins? .... the focus was on "the scale of the probable Obama victory "and what the decisive moments in the campaign have been.

Laura's Video Notebook Part 5

Not who ... but by how much?

It was direct evidence of just how convinced the press here is that Obama will win, and most believe he'll win well.

In fact, if you were someone who had not yet made up their minds, tuning in to decide, you'd be hard pushed to find any news organisation who hasn't pretty much called Tuesday's ballot.

Media saturation

That show was just one of many in the deafening volume of coverage there has been of this election. We've seen how much the web has been dominant, and with dozens of TV channels, radio, email alerts, twitters, ads, satire, not even including the traditional newspapers, the amount of stuff out there could be suffocating. And having witnessed much of it over the last few weeks it's fair to say that the coverage has mostly been driven by controversy, not clarity!

Apart from some right of centre blogs that make the most of the tighter polling data from some states, much of the tone of the coverage is now concentrated on predictions of scale of an Obama victory. There is not much consensus on that but now there is less than forty eight hours until the actual result should be clear.

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