Political views aside, this has been a very interesting Presidential campaign season. As we approach election day 2008, our friend the Electoral College becomes the focus of the news. While early in the campaign new outlets such as CNN and USA Today focus on their nationwide polling, the election is actually determined by the electoral college which has become the recent focus.
For the past few weeks I have been watching the polling at electoral-vote.com. This site seems to do the best job of presenting polling data in an open, honest, and accurate way. The web site places each state into one of 7 categories based on all available polling data for the last week. The categories including Strongly Democrat (10%+), Weakly Democrat (5%+), Barely Democrat (1%+), Tied, Barely Republican (1%+), Weakly Republican (5%+) and Strongly Republican (10%+). The site does a pretty good job of discussing polling, and how much of a lead a candidate should have in a poll to safely guess the vote. Electoral votes are tallied based on the polling and displayed as a total, and placed into the above mentioned categories.
If the election were today, Barack Obama has 264 votes from states that are Strongly Democrat, and John McCain has 137 from states that are Strongly Republican. These votes are pretty safe. What these data really drive home is that Obama only needs 6 votes to reach the 270 votes needed to win the election.
Of course the news media outlets want you to keep watching their programming and reading their newspapers, so they concentrate on states that are close, or are “swing states”, to make the election seem close. This is contrary to the data that show that Obama will almost certainly win if he can maintain his 10%+ lead in the 20 states plus District of Columbia that are categorized Strongly Democrat. And no one can predict the future. In the 14+ days until the election, perhaps we will learn that Obama did something horrific in his past and the vote will swing to McCain.
No matter what your politics are, the data are very clear.
