The thing about being a modern day astronomer is that you learn how to computer program. But who ever said you computer skills have to be limited to astronomy applications alone? No one! So, I've used my skills for fun and produced the 2 electoral maps of the us and I think Obama should win, but right now it is close. More below ..
So the other day I came across this at pollster.com and thought it must be good, these are my people. Sadly, I didn't like the conclusions drawn on. So I thought I'd do my own analysis. So I built some code to do this. Basically, it draws a map of the US coloring each state according to who is leading in the polls. The data I used came from pollster.com. And I'm going to show you two maps.
Below are two maps. Blue and red colors are for expected solid victories for Obama and McCain, respectively. Light blue and pink are for leaning Obama and McCain states. White states are statistical ties, with the text color indicating which candidate is slightly ahead.
The first map looks at the poll averages for the last 100 days and says that McCain would likely be the victor .. ugh. It makes me hurt to even look at this. But happened in the last 100 days. Wright for one thing. A lot of democratic primaries and McCain was doing nothing important. Looking at smaller ranges, like 50 days or even 20 days just switches the white states to pink. Its only been in the last week that Obama has become the nominee, so lets take a closer look there.
In the last 10 days, Obama has had the wonderful endorsement of Hillary Clinton and that seems to have helped to solidify the map a little. for the most part, several McCain leaning states have either switched to Obama (like MI and MO) or weakend (like VA and NC). A lot has happened in little time .. and the truth is so few polls have been conducted after Obama's nomination (I think about 6 or 8 so far) that this 10 day average map will change.
If you live in one of those white states, but really anywhere, get out and help make your home state go blue. Even if you live in AZ .. AZ has made such progress going blue in the last few elections that I don't think McCain should take it for granted that he'll win there. So no one should sit on their butts and let other people do the work .. get out. Register voters. Donate money or time. Help the campaign!! You'll feel good about it.
Finally, I'll just add that I hope to keep posting these maps through November at maybe once a week or every other week so we can all watch it get bluer and bluer.