This spreadsheet of the Obama campaign that was leaked out has given me endless hours of entertainment.  It’s great to know what they reasonably expect to get from each state and how the entire race might play out.  

At this moment of time, they expected to have a 53 delegate advantage over the Clinton campaign.  Over this past weekend all we have heard from the Clinton campaign is how they expected Obama to win Washington, Nebraska, and Lousiana.  They added Maine to that list because it is a caucus, has a large African American population, and most people there have at least 3 PhD’s.  

According to the Obama spreadsheet, he is outperforming his expectations by picking up 24!!! more delegates than they expected to, leading by 77 delegates right now.  As someone else said, Barack is doing a good job of setting the expectations quite high, and then exceeding them.  That is amazing.  But that is not the reason I am writing this diary.

As a disclaimer, I’m a huge Obama Supporter.  Every piece of news I see I look to see if it will hurt or help Barack.  Well, the dominant news of day was Romney dropping out and McCain having the Republican nomination sewn up.  Onto how that helps Barack

So I am one of those people who LOVES poring over polling data, PVI's, and all that other good information to try and predict what will happen over the next 20 days. I'm pretty poor nowadays, but I still try and donate to different candidates every year. I feel like I am at a horse race and it is fun to have many different bets to pick the winners. So rather than donate to the ACTBlue or the DCCC, I try to figure out who needs my money the most and who can use it most effectively, while cutting out the overhead that the DCCC might have.

Then it hit me on how to make my money twice as effective.

Sorry I don't have a link or good editing ability, but I just recieved this in my e-mail a few seconds ago:

WPDE NEWSCHANNEL 15 BREAKING:

GOVERNOR MARK SANFORD SAID HE DIDN'T KNOW THE TERM "TAR BABY" WAS DEROGATORY.. AND IS APOLOGIZING TONIGHT FOR EVER SAYING IT.

LAST MONTH DURING A MEETING OF THE STATE BUDGET AND CONTROL BOARD, SANFORD USED THE PHRASE "DANCING WITH A TAR BABY" WHILE TALKING ABOUT WAYS THE STATE CAN GET RID OF 250 ACRES NEAR THE OLD AIR FORCE BASE IN MYRTLE BEACH.

THE TERM TAR BABY IS A RACIALLY DEROGATORY TERM USED TO DESCRIBE AFRICAN AMERICANS.

IN A WRITTEN STATEMENT, THE GOVERNOR'S PRESS SECRETARY SAYS THE GOVERNOR WAS NOT AWARE THE TERM WAS CONSIDERED DEROGATORY AND ISSUED THE APOLOGY.

STATE SENATOR ROBERT FORD OF CHARLESTON TONIGHT SAID THE COMMENT WAS A RACIAL SLUR.

IN VIRGINIA, SENATOR GEORGE ALLEN HAS WATCHED HIS POLL NUMBERS DROP AFTER HE USED THE WORD "MACACA" TO DESCRIBE A YOUNG MAN OF INDIAN DESCENT.  ALLEN ALSO APOLOGIZED FOR THE REMARK.

I am sooooo confused.  I saw this over on Freep saying that the Ohio Poll "watchers" are back on:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1265931/posts

And I went over to that Moritz's guys site and it says an appeal was filed at 11:37 EST:

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/

So the timeline looks like they decided to have election watchers.  I guess I'll find out tomorrow sometime what actually has happened.

I heard this on the CBS evening news tonight that Bush was winning 51 to 43% in people who have already cast their ballots.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/31/opinion/polls/main652496.shtml

I was a little bit depressed about this, thinking the good news that I have heard from Iowa and New Mexico about early voting might have been wrong.  Then I decided to look at which states have early voting:

http://www.democrats.org/evc/

That immidiately made me feel estatic.  The only places where democrats should win easily is California, Hawaii, Oregon and Vermont.  The other 19 states have 4 realistic battleground states (Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, and Michigan) a reach battleground (Nevada), and the rest are solidly republican.  

Now, I know what you are thinking that Cali is pretty big and might have a lot of democrats, but I am one of two people I know who actually vote absentee (you can do it perminantly) and almost everybody else actually goes to the polls.  So for Bush to be winning only 51-43% with that target population it's amazing.

I happened to wander over to FreeRepublic and saw this poll.  It asks weather you agree with the Dispatch's endorsement of George Bush.  It's on the front page here:

10tv.com

(if somebody with better HTML wants to redo this I'd be glad to delete this diary.

to Afghanistan.  All the time I see Kerry/Edwards implying that they could get countries like France and Germany to contribute support and troops to Iraq, even though all the countries say they would not contribute any troops to Iraq no matter who wins.  I think Kerry/Edwards is going all about it wrong.

What they should be saying is that they would be more likely to contribute support in Iraq and give more troops in Afghanistan so that we can draw down their commitment in that country so that we won't be overdrawn everywhere.  I think this is arguement that the people will believe and can actually happen if Kerry can win.