The Breakdown for Oct. 1

Today's breakdown numbers are a perfect example of why you should never believe statistics. If you just look at the numbers below, you'd assume that McCain's position is as strong as it has been for the last several days. Unfortunately for McCain, that's not the case. Remember, the numbers below are really intended as more of a scale to the information in the chart than as anything really useful in and of themselves. They tell you the most likely range of outcomes if the election were held today, but they don't really tell you anything about the likelihood of those outcomes and they only give you the most basic information about the trends that we're seeing. The chart gives you all that information, just not in exact numbers.

Obama's numbers remain unchanged today, but today was a very bad day for McCain. OH and NC-- together 35 EVs-- join FL in the tied column, while GA and WV move from the Strong Column into the Barely column. I still doubt that Obama will win either of those states over, but Nate at fivethirtyeight.com places Obama's odds of taking the states at 13% and 26% respectively. They have Obama's Overall win percentage at a huge 85.4%!

If the election were held today and...	Obama	McCain
...all McCain <5% went to Obama	375	163
...all Obama <5% went to McCain	250	288
Shift since yesterday:	+0	-0
Shift this week:	+21	-52

(See this post for an explanation of these numbers.)
(Note: The shift numbers in the breakdown has been wrong for most of the week. I put some bad data in, and since the numbers haven't changed, I didn't notice it to fix it. The data here is correct, and the older numbers will be corrected soon. The totals were correct, only the shift numbers were wrong. UPDATE: Oops. The totals for a McCain win were wrong too... Not sure how I missed that, but it's been fixed.)