Thanks to BurntOrangeReport’s Phillip Martin for pointing out these two Web sites in his comment to my posting of March 11, “Lobbying the Superdelegates.” The first is a state-by-state map showing how Barack Obama will defeat John McCain, based on SurveyUSA polls in all 50 states, with 600 respondents per state. The second shows how Hillary Clinton will defeat McCain.
Think of these as grown-up toys. Even SurveyUSA makes no pretense that the results are scientific:
There are specific limitations to this exercise. The winner’s margin in each state is not always outside of the survey’s margin of sampling error. Rather than show states where the results are inside of the margin of sampling error as “leaning” or “toss-ups,” SurveyUSA for this illustration assigned Electoral Votes to the candidate with the larger share of the vote, no matter how small the winner’s margin. The Democratic nominee is not yet known. Running mates on neither side are known. These are not surveys of likely voters, these are surveys of registered voters. Those caveats stated, the exercise is a remarkable foreshadowing of how contested, and how fiercely fought, the general election in November may be, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is. And the exercise speaks to which states may vote one way or the other, depending on who the Democrats nominate.
