"States" OF THE RACE - 08/11/08

I decided to look at a quick snapshot of the race (since I heard a PUMA say that the race is tight) and here's what I found.

It's NOT CLOSE.

1) Looking at the RCP map(and table) I found that Barack Obama is outperforming Kerry in almost every state (all states, not just those that Kerry won).

The only states where he underperforms Kerry are Arkansas(-6.6), Arizona (-3.2), Tennessee (-1.7), Louisiana (-2.2), and Michigan (-0.2). As you can see, the only state that matters in this group is Michigan - and a 0.2 difference is minimal.

The average difference between Obama and Kerry in the other states (at this point) is 6.4. That's right, a 6.4% point difference between Obama and Kerry in all states where Obama is performing better. I don't know about you guys but that number looks huge to me.

The states with the biggest differences from 2004 are...

Wisconsin (10), 7.6
Iowa (7), 8.1
Virginia (13), 8.2
Connecticut (7), 8.3
Mississippi (6), 8.3
North Carolina (15), 8.7
Georgia (15), 9.6
Illinois (21), 10.0
Kansas (6), 10.7
Texas (34), 12.4
Indiana (11), 21.2

2) Mark Nickolas from politicalbase.com found that winning by just a few points in the popular vote translates to a landslide in the electoral vote.

http://www.politicalbase.com/profile/Mark%20Nickolas/blog/&blogId=3012

He found that a 5 point margin of victory in the popular vote would translate to a 200 point victory in the electoral vote.