Which Candidate has a Base Problem?

You should now an additional graph along the right-hand side of the page, which I have dubbed the ’Swing State Analysis’. What this tells you is which states are likely to ’swing’ the election. As I describe it here : I’m now reporting another new parameter in my output, which is the state that "swings" the election in each of the simulation runs. The way that this works is as follows: I arrange the states from best to worst in order of Obama’s (or ... more

I decided to look at something relatively basic tonight that I should have looked at a long time ago. Do the Democratic candidates fare better in the polls in the states in which there has been an active primary campaign? It turns out that the answer appears to be yes for one of the candidates. Consider the following: In Ohio, where there has been a primary campaign, Barack Obama leads McCain by 2.6 points in our weighted average of polls. In Pennsylvania, where there hasn’t yet been a... more

Although the Clinton campaign has been dismissing the importance of primaries in any states that have fewer than 1,000, or more than 100,000 black people contain more Starbucks than Dunkin’ Donuts had the audacity to vote for Obama, this may be the first time they’ve written off a state in the general election. Actually, four states, according to Harold Ickes in today’s New York Times : They’re great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in t... more

A couple of new polls from Pennsylvania: Rasmussen shows McCain leading Obama by 1 and Clinton by 2, whereas Susquehana shows a bigger split between the two Dems: McCain leads Obama by 4, but trails Clinton by 3. Rasmussen also has a new Michigan poll out, with both Democrats trailing McCain by 3 points. These polls, when combined with the new pollster weightings that we rolled out yesterday, reduce Obama’s overall win percentage from 61.7% to 59.5%. Clinton’s number... more