Wargaming the Electoral College

That’s using the best polling data I could find from around the web, plus a couple of educated guesses and exactly one hunch.

UPDATE

With last week’s computer problems, I missed Larry Sabato’s latest map:

Yes, the two maps are identical. Nice to be in such good company.

UPDATE

Election Projection’s map looks similar, but they switched Iowa and Wisconsin. . .

. . . giving Bush a 285-253 victory.

The EP folks are ballsier than I am, and are willing to call the popular vote. They’ve got Bush at 51.1% to Kerry’s 47.0%. Kerry at 47-point-nothin’ sounds about right at this time, but Bush is going to have to work harder to crack 51%. I still think that a Kerry collapse (47% or less) is more likely to lead to a surge for Nader than for Bush.