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 [...]

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 [...]

Post convention polls have been favorable to John McCain and he now has the lead in several electoral map predictions as of September 15th.

Five Thirty Eight: Obama 250.3 McCain 287.7

Princeton Election Consortium: Obama 273 McCain 265

Electoral-Vote.com: Obama 268 McCain 270

RealClearPolitics: Obama 273 McCain 265

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Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist, has a new electoral map out featured on the LA Times website.
Overall, Obama holds on to 226 electoral votes, while McCain moves up to 200 votes, and 112 votes are a toss-up, a new high in that category. McCain picked up two states from the toss-up column — Montana (3 [...]

The recent New York Times article Rival Tickets Are Redrawing Battlegrounds contains an advertising spend map and campaign stop maps showing where John McCain and Barack Obama are making campaign spots and spending money on TV advertising. Both are spending heavily in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Nevada. Obama is out spending [...]

John McCain’s speech at the Republican National Convention, like Obama’s a week earlier, made several geographic references. For the most part they can be categorized as either part of his personal background (war stories) or related to political issues (conflicts in the case of other countries and mostly political pandering in the case [...]

Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention at Invesco Field in Denver Colorado made several geographic references. For the most part they can be categorized by as personal background or politics, with politics including both policy matters and random call outs that could be considered pandering (Michigan + Ohio).  Maps and tag [...]

Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama selected fellow Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate.
Some links to more info about Joe Biden and some reactions to Obama’s choice.

The newest post on key swing states at Real Clear Politics examines Virginia, where Obama hopes to become the first Democrat to carry the state since Johnson in 1964. The large African-American population should help Obama and the large veteran population should help McCain.

Swing State Review: Virginia

Here are five things [...]