The Votemaster's McCain v. Clinton/Obama maps
Numbers, numbers, who’s got the numbers? The Votemaster, that's who. I confess to finding the digested information at the widely-discredited DailyKos.com, but they jive with my rough addition of the Votemaster's maps. And the Votemaster doesn't lie. I think.
Electoral-vote.com
maintains daily maps showing general election matchups by state, rated by
strong, weak and slight support for the Democratic ticket. Apparently
Hillary's folks have been touting these numbers as proof that Obama loses to
McCain in the general.
Clinton's version of E-V’s April 23rd maps:
Clinton v McCain:
McCain: 239
Clinton: 289
Ties: 10
Obama v
McCain:
McCain: 254
Obama: 269
Ties: 15
E-V’s rated breakdown for the same map:
Obama Clinton
Strong Dem 67 74
Weak Dem 144 98
Barely Dem 58 117
Tied 15 10
Barely GOP 76 13
Weak GOP 44 89
Strong GOP 134 137
Basically, the Clinton camp provides us with unweighted totals. But Clinton doesn’t look nearly as great when you break the
numbers down. She does indeed have more
strong Democratic support. But if you
add strong and weak, it’s 172 Clinton vs. 211 Obama. Worse, 117 of Clinton's electors are in barely-Dem states, vs. 58 for
Obama.
Now, I know DailyKos has fallen hopelessly in love with Obama, but the
Votemaster's numbers seem to reflect the range of current polls reported on
TPM, and you can add up the electors yourself if you think Kos is lying.
Hit 'recommend' if you find this interesting, and then hack away at will. I know my avatar is ugly, but I'm not. Really.
I hope you don't mind if I plug an earlier post of my own on the same topic. I took the Votemaster's data from April 24th and ran two Monte Carlo simulations of the election, assuming any polling errors in the states were independent. The results were that Obama won many more of the simulated matchups than Clinton did. It's an attempt to quantify the observation that Hillary was slightly leading in many more states against McCain, whereas McCain was slightly leading in more states against Obama.
The Votemaster, Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum, is simply reporting straight numbers, and I took his numbers and applied a simple simulation model. Ominously for Obama, the current reason my model showed him doing better than Clinton was a late February (pre-primary/caucus two-step, and much before the Wright and bitter kerfuffles) poll showing Obama virtually tied with McCain in Texas. If you think Obama is truly making inroads in red states, this may be a harbinger of a truly game-changing campaign. Or it might be lucky timing of polling while Obama was saturating the state with ads in the run-up to the primary.
Of course things can, will, change. Obama may put more previously red states in play (e.g. Virginia) that the numbers currently would say are out of reach. I think the fairest interpretation of Tanenbaum's is that as of now, both candidates would be in a tight race with McCain. They are stronger in different regions, but both stand a good chance to win in November. And, ominously, McCain still has a good chance to defeat either.
April 25, 2008 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, Fosberry; I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one using Prof. Tanenbaum's website. I found it in the midst of my 2004 election-based psychosis while isolated in a jubilantly Republican law office in Utah. I find it far more user-friendly than Pollster.com, and he seems to update his data more quickly.
Kos did a more thorough job interpreting the numbers than I did. As of April 8th, he shows Obama beating McCain in Michigan 43-41 while Clinton loses to McCain 37-46. And given that each -gate (bitter, Wright, NAFTA, Iran-nuking) hasn't really changed a whole lot...
But heaven only knows what all this means. Change is inevitable. Even my beyond-conservative priesthood-holding officemates now favor Obama over McCain, and both over Clinton. Obama isn't likely to take Utah, but our neighboring states are leaning pretty strongly his way.
I'm going to try to ask the Professor whether he can add electoral tallies to each map. He does a great job, but given how things are shifting these days it'd be nice to compare numbers over time without having to do anything for myself.
April 25, 2008 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
So the Votemaster is Andrew Tanenbaum.
The MINIX guy.
I remember being slavishly devoted to his page back in 2004, but I had no idea.
April 26, 2008 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for a great link. Very encouraging.
April 26, 2008 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
THIS IS GREAT NEWS!! FOR--UM...let me see...where'd I leave my calculator?
April 26, 2008 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
For some reason I'm still showing up on Muckraker as a recent post, so I'll take the opportunity to route you to Fossberry's Probability of Electability blog:
tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/probabilities-of-electability.php
April 26, 2008 10:17 PM | Reply | Permalink