As everyone probably knows by now, McCain got a solid bounce from his convention. Sarah Palin's speech and to some extent his own speech were very well received by Republicans and some independents. What hasn't been reported until now is the geographic distribution of the bounce.
The Democratic convention was Aug. 25-28 and the Republican convention was Sept. 1-4, so the second column is the pre-convention baseline and the fourth one was taken during and after the Republican convention. If we compare the third and fourth columns to see the effect of the Republican convention, the biggest effect was in the South, where McCain is likely to win most states anyway, and a bit in the East, where Obama is likely to win everything. The effect in the crucial Midwest and West was smaller.
See Electoral-Vote.com for the numbers... They're worth looking at.
3 comments:
Similarly, Fivethirtyeight.com reported on 9/11
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/todays-polls-911.html
an 8.4% chance of Obama winning the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. The Revenge-of-Al-Gore (RoAG) scenario currently occurs in 9.7% of their simulations. As I recall, this number was well under 1% a week ago.
Yeah it looks like a lot of McCain's votes are "wasted." Getting 75% instead of 70% in Utah doesn't pick him up any more EVs.
Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium thinks this means McCain needs to be ahead 1-2% in the national polls to tie in electoral votes.
http://election.princeton.edu/2008/09/12/watching-the-next-wave-break/#more-1033
I like the new chart - a thicker line at 50% would be useful
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