This is a daily feature of this blog. For further detail, please see this post.
| State | RCP | Pollster | 538 | 538 Win % |
| NV | +7.4 | +5.9 | +3.3 | 83% |
| CO | +6.5 | +6.5 | +5.5 | 93% |
| IN | -1.5 | -0.3 | -0.7 | 44% |
| MO | +0.2 | +1.7 | +0.1 | 53% |
| OH | +5.8 | +6.3 | +2.9 | 80% |
| VA | +6.5 | +7.8 | +5.9 | 94% |
| NC | +2.5 | +2.5 | +0.5 | 57% |
| FL | +3.5 | +2.6 | +1.7 | 70% |
Nothing really new today. If I had to classify these races, I'd say Colorado, Nevada and Virginia are "Likely Obama", Ohio and Florida "Lean Obama" and
I'm curious to see what (if any) the impact of Obama's infomercial will be. We might find out as soon as tomorrow.
Update: I was thinking about the race and what would happen if Obama wins the states I have as "likely Obama", splits the states I have "lean Obama", and loses all the toss-ups. Well, in that very reasonable scenario, he can even afford to lose Pennsylvania and still win the election.
(Just to reiterate, I don't think Obama is in any danger of losing Pennsylvania. 538 gives him a 99% chance of winning there and pollster.com has Obama up by 8.7 points in the state.)
Update 2: Heck, he could even lose Ohio in that scenario (20 EV). Wow.
9 comments:
The race seems to have stabilized. The fact that polling in swing states is keeping up with national polls, or even ahead (VA, OH, NV) suggests that the Obama campaign is doing very well.
Once again, the Bell Curve shows us the monumentous importance of the Mountain West (oh, and Virginia)!
Must admit, I'm still finding it weird, looking at those mostly-red maps, and being told that they're "Obama wins" pictures. Simply because there are such large geographical areas of the country that aren't his.
It's all about the population, Pombat. There's a cartogram over at electoral-vote.com that shows the states re-sized to represent their electoral power. It looks more Obama-like :-)
Yeah, I know it's population based (which makes sense in terms of democratic fairness etc), it just *looks* weird, tis all!
Pombat... Sorry, of course I knew you knew that. What I meant to say was: it has been said on this blog that this will be more of an urban vs. rural election than any other in history--and that comes through very clearly on the maps. The population shift to the urban centers since WWII continues.
Pombat,
You may be interested in checking out this site:
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
It shows a series of maps designed to show the population patterns as they relate to support for Republicans in 2004.
Now, I like that link you've posted Dr.S - that looks *much* more like it.
It's a simple mental block I have, in that I'm not aware of the populations in various bits of the US, and therefore base my immediate reaction on the geographical size. In Australia for example, I don't ever expect WA to have a massive influence in an election, because I also know the population size of each state/territory.
I agree with the urban vs rural point, although I have to wonder if what's good for urban populations is really that bad for rural and vice versa? And a question - why is it that Colorado and New Mexico are Obama-friendly, despite being surrounded by red states? Are they particularly urban, do they have a history of being blue, or is this all a bit unexpected from them?...
The urban rural split is real. Rural areas have different problems than urban areas and prefer different solutions. Problems like drugs, teen pregnancy, population decline, chronic unemployment etc are all worse in rural areas than in urban areas. Rural voters blame all of these problems on urban influence of course.
Rural areas are far more dependent on federal subsidies and transfer payments. In an environment where funding for such programs is scarce there is some regional competition over money and rural politicians have gotten quite good at opposing any program that would benefit urban areas as "welfare" and framing rural transfer payments (like ag subsidies) as "preserving the American way of life."
Rural voters also prefer to deal with their drug and teen pregnancy epidemics with draconian, moralistic crack downs using increasing police power and other prohibitions on behavior.
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