The Week In Review

7/27: The last full week of July was a very busy weeks in both the campaigns and in the polls. Sen. Obama spent the week touring the Middle East and Europe while Sen. McCain toured the country speaking on his energy, economic and defense policies. Toward the end of this week a fairly significant bump in the national tracking polls of both Rasmussen (+2 Obama to plus +6 Obama between the 19th and the 26th) and Gallup (+3 Obama to +7) became apparent. At the same time, state polls showed exactly the opposite. There were 27 polls last week in 19 states, 10 of which resulted in a color change on the electoral map (New Hampshire, Florida and Colorado switched twice), all of which occurred in competitive states. Below is the electoral map on July 19th:


5 states ended up with a change in color. New Hampshire was a toss-up and moved barely in Obama's column, while Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico all moved 1 shade closer to McCain. Additionally, while McCain did not gain any electoral votes for the week (he had Florida for 1 day), Obama lost 16 (Ohio barely Obama to toss-up, and New Hampshire toss-up to barely Obama).


Finally, as a result of the states polls this week, Sen. McCain has gained a net of nearly 1.3 million votes (nearly 1%) and cut the overall lead from 6.1 million (4.42%) to 4.8 million (3.49%) votes.
Last week I made mention of the 260 electoral votes Sen. Obama had either leaning or safely on his side. Today that number has dropped to 238. The new map favors Sen. Obama considerably, but Sen. McCain's math is better. Today, McCain would have to win all the red states (197 EV) plus all of the toss-up states. Of the toss-ups, McCain is currently ahead in Florida (224), North Dakota (227) and Virginia (240), and behind by less than 2% in both Ohio (260) and Nevada (265). The 3 likely targets that get Sen. McCain to 270 are Colorado, (where he's down by 3.5%), New Mexico (down 4.36%) and Michigan (down 5.38%). all of these will likely be in conjunction with New Hampshire whre he is behind by 4.04%, but by itself only gets him an electoral tie.