Jmac - PA's just not that into you.

John McCain thinks he's going to pull off the upset. He plans to do it by winning Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes. This would maybe not be the dumbest strategy in the world if he were polling, oh, I don't know... within 10% of Barack Obama in the state. I mean - it's very true some polls are sometimes wrong. The common belief is that polls just aren't accurate, and perhaps this is a fair assessment when you are the kind of person that picks out a key poll and expects it to be exactly the same as the outcome. But ALL POLLS are not consistently far from the outcome. Example: Obama is polling about 33% in Utah. It would be completely moronic for me to expect him to magically pull off a close 49% in the end. No, he's been polling at about 33% and maybe he'll do amazing well there and somehow hit 36%, maybe he'll only be at 30%... But we know he's not going to rebound more than 10 points and somehow make the state competitive. Obama leads McCain 52%-41% in a combination of the top 8 recent major polls.

Indeed, maybe it would be absurd to assume Pennsylvania is going to be the Obama blowout predicted by the most recent set of polls - but with the exception of a couple mid-September polls that showed a dead heat, every poll for months has shown Obama with a significant lead. This is not some recent development, Obama has been winning for months.

So John McCain thinks he can do this.

Can I just say... WHY IS HE DOING THIS?! He's throwing all his resources in this one place... Where could there be a flaw in this? How about Nevada? Let's assume John McCain's fantasy of taking PA does happen by some act of the devil... The map could still look like this:



Obama 270, McCain 268. Obama still wins.

John McCain is already making a lot of assumptions to even bring about the remote possibility of a victory.

1 week before election

I'm not a huge fan of leaving "toss-up" states in whatever maps I give; Today I kind of have to. North Carolina, Missouri, Florida, Ohio... these states have been intensely close. In all honesty, I would say that Ohio looks to be increasingly Obama at this point. However, John McCain is still campaigning there heavily, perhaps his polls don't show the current 50-42% spread that all the other polls are showing. Then again, he's still campaigning as if he'll take Pennsylvania, where he is *and has been* down by 15 points.

Sorry, but I had to throw this out there.

Less than two weeks ago, some Republicans started an attack on how Obama has been using an "Obama flag" at his recent rallies in Ohio. It created an outrage among conservative voters who kept calling in to talk about how Obama was disgracing the flag and how Obama supporters are insane. Some people, I'm sure, will remember this because nationally syndicated conservative talk shows started blowing this up until finally Keith Olbermann or somebody pointed out what they were doing and they shut up about it to avoid more significant fallout over the issue.

As it turned out, these conservative talking heads were "not aware" that Obama was actually standing in front of the Ohio flag. Here's an example of this:



Here is Obama in front of the "Obama flag" a.k.a. the OHIO flag:


ANYWAY, the point is that I had to laugh when I took a look at the audience at recent McCain/Palin rallies... Luckily, a CNN photo from an unrelated story today happened to catch my observation in the background on the left side.