general election map

red states are republican strongholds, dark blue states are democratic strongholds, yellow states are swing states that are leaning towards john mccain, and light blue states are swing states that are leaning towards barack obama. i used data from 4 sources for my analysis: cnn.com, electoralmap.net, electoral-vote.com, and mydd.com. swing states are ones that are listed as “toss up” by cnn.com as well as ones with conflicting predictions from different sites. the predictions are based on combining together the results from each of those 4 websites (e.g., since mccain wins florida on 2 sites and obama wins it on 1 site and it is a toss-up on the other, mccain gets florida since 2 > 1). interestingly enough, my predictions agree with electoral-vote.com on every state except florida, which i predict goes to mccain while electoral-vote.com predicts it goes to obama. cnn.com labels a huge number of states as toss-up: all the swing states except for new mexico. cnn.com gives new mexico to mccain, while the other 3 sites all give it to obama, so in that 1 instance, cnn.com also disagrees with me. as for electoralmap.net, it predicts mccain wins missouri while 2 other sites predict obama wins missouri, so that is the 1 instance where it disagrees with my predictions. and as for mydd.com, it agrees with my predictions on every state except ohio, which it predicts goes to mccain, while 2 other sites predict ohio goes to obama. so for each of the 4 sites, there was exactly 1 state it predicted differently from me, and a different state for each site. so my combined predictions are theoretically more accurate than the predictions of any of these 4 sites. i am awesome! oh and guess what? according to these predictions, barack obama will win every state john kerry won in 2004, plus 6 states that george w. bush won in 2004. john mccain will win all the states george w. bush won in 2004 except the 6 that barack obama will win. those 6 states (colorado, iowa, missouri, new mexico, ohio, and virginia) have enough electoral votes to switch the balance in obama’s favor so that he beats mccain by a huge margin. hopefully obama will stay ahead of mccain in the polls up thru election day, especially in all those swing states.