Weekly Horse Race

According to the gamblers, this hasn't been a good week for George W. Bush's electoral prospects. This isn't because the oddsmakers maps have shifted decisively against him. After a brief flirtation with prices below fifty, Ohio has been trading at the upper range of the weak Bush terrain (59). New Mexico is currently trading at exactly 50, so I've deducted it from either side's tally. The bad news for Bush is that his aggregate rankings have begun to drop. Since I started tracking this stuff over a month ago, his total number of points has tended to hover around 3000 (that's a sum of his percent chance across all 50 states). This number had been remarkably stable, but recently the prices of states across the board have dropped by several points. Several strong southern states (Virginia) are now trading in the 80s and several borderline states (Michigan, et al.) are now trading in the thirties. This would indicate that Kerry may be tightening his grip on Democrat leaning states while Bush is losing his grip on safe Republican states.

Tradesports

Strong Bush (60+%) = 244 Weak Bush (50-60%) = 34
Strong Kerry (40-%) = 217 Weak Kerry (40-50%) = 38

Bush v. Kerry = 278 - 255

According to the polls, it is John Kerry's support which appears to be softening. An interesting development is that the averaged poll results for Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia come out to an exact tie, leaving a chunk of 46 electoral votes up in the air. To reflect this, I've colored in the "obvious states" that haven't been polled yet (Alaska, Hawaii) etc. Intuition would tell me that, of the remaining "soft states" it's Bush's which would seem weaker (New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin) than Kerry's. But of course, this election isn't being fought intuitively. The map below shows a Bush victory, and in order to break that lock, we'd need to see some movement in New Jersey, Wisconsin, or Florida.

Averaged Polls

Strong Bush (+5%) = 199 Weak Bush (<5%) = 80
Strong Kerry (+5%) = 164 Weak Kerry (<5%) = 49
Exactly Even = 46

Bush v. Kerry = 279 - 213