Monday, June 9, 2008

Presidential Electoral Preview: Early Small Lead for Obama

I know there is still a lot of time until November, but if you want a preview of how the electoral vote count for the presidential race is shaping up, there are several good sites out there. Here are the latest electoral counts up according to several, based on state-by-state polling:

Presidential Polls: Obama - 303, McCain - 235.

Electoral-Vote: Obama - 299, McCain - 239 (counting ties as half each).

Election Projection: Obama - 304 , McCain - 234.

FiveThirtyEight: Obama - 273, McCain - 265 (rounded).

Real Clear Politics: Obama - 272, McCain - 266.

Worse yet for Republicans, if we deduct the state where the polls are close, that widens Obama's lead. His lead on RCP goes from 6 to 38 when the toss ups are tossed out. The polls also show up to 9 Senate pickups for the Democrats. And in a final troubling fact for the GOP, if nothing changes, this will only get worse. People are more likely to go to the trouble of voting, or working to get their friends to go vote, if they think their side is going to win. So the longer it looks like a Republican defeat, the more likely Republicans won't bother.

Republican advisers no doubt understand this as well, which means if they have a few scandalous bombs to drop, they are likely to drop one soon. I'm pretty curious to see what they have. So far all anyone has really done is shoot down his associates, and most of them were pretty low anyway. No one has really taken a shot at him yet, and I think they are going to have to if they want anything to stick with independents.

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