Electoral College Update

I know I just did this back on Monday, but we are getting down to the wire here, and things actually are changing.

There has been a lot of the talk in the media about "tightening", and it is showing up in most of the electoral college counting polls. However, everyone still has Obama past the number of votes needed to win. To give you a sense of the direction and speed of things, I'll use the common shorthand of putting Monday's numbers in parentheses. Remember that a presidential win requires 270 electoral votes.

Pollster shows some tighening with Obama at 306(315) electoral vote to 157(157) for McCain. Rasmussen also shows it slightly tightened to 286(305) to 174(174). CNN is unchanged (perhaps unupdated) at 277(277) to 174(174). The statistical site FiveThirtyEight on the other hand has Obama's lead growing to 354.4(343.9) to 183.6(194.1). Note that these electoral counts tend to follow behind poll trends by several days. FiveThirtyEight mostly doesn't have that problem, as he reanalyzes polling numbers every day as they come in. That's probably the reason his is going a different direction, although it could also be due to the fact that he doesn't leave any state out as a "tossup".