I really like Marc Ambinder. I'm at his site several times a day. I think his reporting is top-notch, and his insight into elections is among the best in the business. But the electoral map he posted today I'm just not sure about.
Ambinder gives both Barack Obama and John McCain 159 electoral votes in their base. I'm not sure if this is intentionally balanced out or just coincidence. But if McCain believes that all of those EVs are out of play, he is sorely mistaken.
Among that group of safe states for McCain are (in alphabetical order) Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota, none of which are off the table at this juncture. They just aren't. They may not be tossups yet, but they aren't safe. Of these six, Obama is currently advertising in three -- Alaska, Georgia and North Dakota -- and I would not be surprised if Nebraska sees some advertising dollars before election day (both because one or two of the states congressional districts, and thus electoral votes, are in play, and because the Omaha media market bleeds into Iowa). Recent polling out of Georgia, Alaska, and even Kansas show tight races, and the last two polls (.pdf) out of McCain's home state of Arizona show the presumptive GOP nominee at or below 50 percent when pitted against Obama. Safe states these are not.
How about Florida, which Ambinder ranks as a "tilt" McCain state. I had been under the general assumption that Florida wasn't going to be part of the first 270 for any Democratic nominee. I still think there are as many as a half dozen other states Bush carried in 2004 that are more likely to go blue in 2008 than Florida. That said, even before McCain went and angered voters in the state by flipflopping his position on offshore drilling, his numbers were trending downward in the state while Obama's were trending upwards, according to Pollster.com, whose trend estimate in the state gives McCain a slim 45.1 percent to 42.8 percent lead over Obama.
Or take Pennsylvania, which Ambinder deems a "tossup". It's tough to come up with a hard metric, outside of history, that shows that neither candidate has a real advantage in the state. Pollster.com finds Obama moving up in the state and McCain moving down, with Obama holding a substantial 48.7 percent to 40.1 lead. If that's not quite a tilt, then I'm not sure what is.
But beyond the specifics of the states, I think what this listing misses is the big picture; it's too much trees, not enough forest. The Obama effort is going to have significantly more money than the McCain effort -- perhaps on an order of magnitude of 2, 3 or even more times when all campaigns, committees and organizations are taken into account. Because of this, Obama will be able to put McCain on the defensive in a great number of states, making it more difficult for McCain to win in blue states or even hold onto the Bush coalition of 2004. Ben Smith mentions Texas as one such state -- Obama putting staff in the state, plus potentially putting in ads, would force McCain into a tough decision: "Ignore Texas on the overwhelming probability that it stays red; or risk that Obama steals on".
On top of the money disparities, the GOP's brand is in tatters in a way that no party's brand has been in tatters in my lifetime (and perhaps even in the lifetime of most reading this site). The difference in the public's rating of the two parties is remarkable and basically unprecedented (at least in recent memory) and serves as a real drag on McCain.
Finally, and last but not least, the fact that George W. Bush is the most unpopular President in the history of polling remains a real problem for McCain, one that he has not yet even begun to seriously address (and putting out a comment to the press that McCain was going to be at least 30 miles away from Bush while in Iowa isn't going to cut it). Simply put, the American people are increasingly coming to realize that a McCain presidency would represent as close to a third Bush term as it comes -- and that's just not what they're looking for right now.
So given this set of circumstances, both within the states and nation wide, it's hard for me to see it being the case that the base states for McCain and Obama provide the same number of electoral votes, or that McCain's base when including "tilt" states provides him with 8 more electoral votes than Obama's when "tilt" states are included from him. Maybe my glasses are too rosily colored, but I'm just having real difficulty seeing the factual basis for the assumption that McCain is in better shape right now relative to the electoral college than is Obama.
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