The 17 states where the Obama campaign has focused much of their time and resources this year are:

Colorado (9)
Florida (27)
Georgia (15)
Indiana (11)
Iowa (7)
Michigan (17)
Missouri (11)
Montana (3)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Mexico (5)
North Carolina (15)
North Dakota (3)
Ohio (20)
Pennsylvania (21)
Virginia (13)
Wisconsin (10)

If all these states were packaged together into one very large state, it would have 196 electoral votes. The graph below shows how Barack Obama is performing overall in this fictional megastate (he leads 50% to 43%).





If you’ve read my posts, you may know that sometimes I get curious and want to know more. I wanted to see how Obama’s lead has trended in each of these 17 states over the past month or two, so I created the graphs below for each state.

The graphs below show how much Obama has led in each state over time (or trailed, if negative), and whether his lead falls into the margin of error of +/- 3 points (as shown in each graph’s purple rounded rectangle). The blue line shows the tracking of Obama’s lead in each state, and the red line is the majority line of zero. If Obama’s blue line falls below the red line, he is trailing McCain in that state. If Obama’s blue line rises above the red line, he is leading McCain in that state.


I chose +/- 3 points for the margin of error because anything above or below that is equivalent to a 97% probability of winning that state, according to Nate Silver’s correlation illustration below.



^ FIGURE 5d. This graph from FiveThirtyEight.com shows a correlation between a candidate’s lead in the popular vote and that candidate’s probability of winning the electoral vote and the election, if the election were held today.


Enjoy!





















































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Here are three more, for good measure











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