Thursday, March 06, 2008

In which Electability and State Type arguments get thrown in the compactor

Survey USA, a polling outfit with a pretty good track record this year, has polled 600 people in each of the 50 states, and created electoral college maps based on head-to-heads for Obama-McCain and Clinton-McCain. Although they have already warned that there will be some minor tweaks as they update the map to reflect that Nebraska will actually be giving an electoral vote to one of the Dems (the state is not winner-take-all), the preliminary maps show the following margins:

UPDATE
276-262 Clinton
274-264 Obama
(calculated using the interactive map here)

Final Maps show:
276-262 Clinton
280-258 Obama

2 points flipped to Obama in NE. I'm not sure where the other 4 flipped, or if I got it wrong in my first map. The rest of the post remains true.

The fascinating thing about these numbers is that they show almost the exact same margin of victory for each Dem vs. McCain, but the following states each go for McCain on one map, but the Dem on another:

WA,OR,NV,CO,ND,IA,AR,MI,WV,VA,PA,NJ,NH,FA

In other words, the Clinton and Obama victories use entirely different coalitions of states to get to the same EC count.

(OH is Dem on both maps)
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2 comments:

  1. Ben3:27 PM

    McCain - Obama tied in Nebraska? Yeah sure. Interesting map, but not credible

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  2. bonobo3:50 PM

    Not a tie, exactly... NE awards 2 electors to the statewide winner, and one elector to the winner of each of the 3 congressional districts. SUSA polling shows Obama leading in two of the CDs, but trailing so badly in the other that he loses the state.

    What makes this a little easier to understand is that, at the CD level, SUSA was sampling at most 200 people, and the margin for error is almost certainly much greater than the actual spread there.

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