“McCain’s Mountain”
October 31st, 2008Nat Silver of the great fivethirtyeight.com talks about McCain’s Mountain of a Problem as seen in the early voting reports…
Should New Mexico and Colorado become safe Obama states, McCain’s only realistic path to victory runs through Pennsylvania. Even if McCain were to win the Keystone, however — say that Philadelphia remains in a collective stupor from the Phillies’ win and that there is some sort of Bradley Effect in the Alleghanies — Obama has a pretty decent firewall in the form of Virginia and Nevada, which had already achieved 53 percent of its 2004 voting totals as of Wednesday, and where Democrats have a 23-point edge in ballots cast so far in Las Vegas’s Clark County (and perhaps more impressively, a 15-point advantage in Reno’s Washoe County, a traditionally Republican area). The Kerry states less Pennsylvania, but plus Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa and Virginia, total 270 electoral votes: an ugly, nail-biter of a win for Obama, but still one that would get him to 1600 Pennsylvania all the same.
Stumble it!
