Only four weeks until election day and recent polling suggests Barack Obama would win in a landslide if the election was held today. John McCain’s now finds himself having to defend many states that went for Bush in 2004, including Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Virginia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana. It [...]

A few interesting news stories from the past few days…

New York Times: Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds with Multimedia presentation| As economic news worsened, the electoral map shifted in Senator Barack Obama’s favor in September.
Washington Post: U.S. Fiscal Crisis Seems to Have Altered Political Map | The faltering economy [...]

The New York Times has another article and map graphic in their Stateside series examining swing states, this time the focus is on Florida and Obama’s rise in recent polls.
The four most recent polls from late September put Mr. Obama ahead of Mr. McCain by three to eight percentage points, a sharp swing from the [...]

John McCain’s campaign is pulling resources from Michigan and suspending advertising to focus on more competitive states elsewhere.  Obama now leads McCain by a significant margin

Politico:  McCain pulling out of Michigan
The McCain campaign already spent $2 million on advertising in Michigan
Down ballot Republicans not happy
Sarah Palin criticizes the decision

Most of his staff [...]

32 days until election day Senator Barack Obama appears poised to change the electoral map and has several routes to 270 electoral vote.  Senator John McCain now finds himself defending traditional Republican states like Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana.  The key swing states of 2000 & 2004, including Ohio and Florida, are leaning Obama [...]

TheTakeAway.org has created a great way to track and visualize the various electoral vote predictions from around the web, including Real Clear Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Intrade, the New York Times and many others. Each row represents who’s electoral prediction is being used and the columns represent individual states.
To get started just point you mouse [...]

Five weeks until election day and the electoral map provides Senator Barack Obama several routes to 270 electoral vote. The easiest of which appears to be to hold the 2004 Kerry states and pick up Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado. Senator John McCain has fewer options is now defending Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, [...]

The New York Times has another article and map graphic in their Stateside series examining swing states, this time the focus is on Nevada.
Nevada is divided in large part between rural and urban voters, newcomers versus old-timers, the contours of the political discussion formed by growth, energy and immigration. While the voters in the rural [...]

The New York Times has an article and map graphic outlining the challenges and strengths of the McCain and Obama campaigns in Virginia.
No Democratic presidential candidate has won Virginia since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and Republican Party leaders say the selection of Ms. Palin has improved Mr. McCain’s chances of carrying the state. Even [...]

The New York Times examines the challenges facing Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, a state won by both Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004.
To roam the rural reaches of western Pennsylvania, through largely white working-class counties, is to understand the breadth of the challenge facing the two presidential candidates. But this economically ravaged region, once so [...]