Just for fun, I started playing around with the RCP map to see what the final tally would be if Obama swept every battleground state – including a few Lean McCain swing states that haven’t been put away by the McCain camp (West Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, Montana and North Dakota). The Obama ceiling? 411 electoral votes. While it’s impossible to imagine he’d win every one of the states in this equation, there isn’t a single state in the mix that is hard to imagine him carrying (West Virginia has the widest margin for McCain, and that’s in the high single digits.)
The states in the 411 map:
Maine
New Hampshire
Vermont
New York
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Connecticut
New Jersey
Delaware
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Washington D.C.
Virginia
West Virginia
North Carolina
Georgia
Florida
Ohio
Illinois
Indiana
Michigan
Wisconsin
Minnesota
North Dakota
Montana
Missouri
Iowa
Washington
Oregon
California
Nevada
Arizona
New Mexico
Colorado
Hawaii
The best I can get for McCain’s ceiling is 312. To reach that, he’d have to win all the Bush states from 2004 (including Iowa and New Mexico – two states that went for Gore in 2000) + New Hampshire + Pennsylvania + 1 congressional district in Maine.
I’m going to try to make some more predictions later – in the electoral map and in some of the Senate races.
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