Status of the Electoral College

Five new CNN polls show possible movement back towards Obama in several states, as Obama has his first tie or lead in Florida in 5 polls, his first lead in Ohio in 9 polls, and the 3rd poll within 4% in North Carolina in the past 6 (as compared to the other three which all give McCain double-digit leads.  What’s going on in North Carolina?)

Despite general movement towards Obama, McCain’s numbers are the ones which improved on the official board as his 6% lead in Indiana was just enough to move it from Too Close to Call to Weak McCain.  No other states changed status, however.

We have so many polls coming out now that it is quite difficult for any single poll to switch a state which, of course, is good since it’s better to have a broad sample of several polls instead of a situation where a single outliar poll pushes states like Illinois or Louisiana into “Weak” territory when they probably have no business being there.

I should note (and I should add this to the Methodology page sometime) that CNN did release results for both Obama vs. McCain head-to-head as well as polls including third parties.  Obama either had the same margin or improved in every state when 3rd parties were included, going so far as going from a tie in Florida with the head-to-head to being 4% ahead with 3rd parties.

My policy has been that if a polling agency releases a poll where there is one with 3rd parties and one without, I take the straight head-to-head because of my belief that most polls overstate support for 3rd party candidates.  Of course, if they only offer a poll which includes 3rd parties, I’ll use it, but I don’t record the results for the 3rd party candidates.

American Research Group has released their first round of state polling, and it’s somewhat a mixed bag for Obama.

First off, the results seemed skewed a bit towards McCain overall, with North Carolina being +11, Ohio being +6, and Illinois of all places being only Obama +6, enough to push move it from Strong Obama to Weak Obama, just because there aren’t many polls there.

Two McCain states caught my eye themost, though:

The first was Montana, which ARG gives McCain by only 2%, and which puts it in line with polls pre-convention.  This puts into question whether Rasmussen’s post-convention poll was an outlier or not.  We’ll probably need yet another poll, preferably from a third polling company, to find out.  For the time being, Montana is back to Weak McCain from Strong McCain.

The second was West Virginia which has now had two recent polls showing it to be only +5 and +4 for McCain, pushing it unbelievably into the Too Close To Call category.  Can we actually call West Virginia a battleground state now?  This

Louisiana also seemed closer than one would expect, only +7 for McCain, but I kind of see that as McCain’s Illinois - a poll showing a state to be much closer than I actually think it is.  I won’t actually believe Louisiana to be that close until another poll confirms it.  Nevertheless, like Ilinois, due to sparse polling, Louisiana moves from Strong McCain to Lean McCain.

Texas also moves from Weak McCain to Strong McCain, a move I’ve kind of been expecting for a while.

Welcome to the new home of the Status of the Electoral College.  You may have seen my weekly updates at Daily Kos or on my blog Mad Wombat, but I decided to level up my project and so here it is with it’s own domain and much slicker looking and more functional.

Feel free to have a look around.  If you see anything amiss or have an idea for added functionality, drop me a line.

Just a note on the flash map, though: You can click on the map to zoom in, but you have to click on the icon to get taken to the information page for that state.  You can also get to that same page by clicking on the state abbreviation in the sidebar, or by going to State Information and selecting a state from the drop down box.

On the polling front, not much has changed from my update earlier this morning, except an updated South Dakota poll came out moving that to Strong McCain and a new Rasmussen poll for New York came out, probably to see if the Siena poll from a couple days ago showing a 5% race was bogus or not, and it pretty much confirmed that it was having Obama up 55% to 42%, thus New York is back to String Obama.