Electoral Vote Predictor 2004:   Kerry 285   Bush 242

Data in Excel format Battleground states Info about the states Previous report Next report News   Strong Kerry (196) Weak Kerry (26) Barely Kerry (63) Exactly tied (11) Barely Bush (38) Weak Bush (79) Strong Bush (125)

News from the Votemaster

Lots of big news today. New state polls have been released in five states, four of them key battleground states. The most important one is Ohio. Bush has taken over the lead again, 48% to 43%. The importance of Ohio for Bush cannot be overstated. No Republican in history has ever lost Ohio and won the presidency. Almost as important is Florida where three new polls are out. In accordance with this site's policy, we use the one conducted most recently, which is the LA Times poll taken July 17-21, in which Bush is ahead 45% to 44% with Nader at 2%. Will Nader be the spoiler there again? Could be. It is no wonder that Republicans are helping him get on the ballot in several states. The other two Florida polls give almost the same results, basically a statistical tie. Florida and Ohio, together good for 47 of the 270 EVs needed to win, are the states to watch this year.

However, there is also good news for Kerry today. He now has a 10-point lead in Pennsylvania and an 11-point lead in California, up 3 points there due to slightly weaker support for Nader. The final poll gives Kerry a small lead in New Hampshire.

All in all, Kerry's lead in the electoral college has shrunk but he is still ahead, even without Ohio and Florida. It is likely that the Edwards bounce is starting to wear off. Vice-presidential bounces never last more than a couple of weeks.

Today we have gone over to a new, larger, clearer map. In addition, putting the mouse cursor on a state shows the score and the source. The mouseover data is taken from the Excel spreadsheet, but can be used to quickly answer questions like: "Who says Tennessee is tied?" (A: Zogby). JavaScript must be enabled to get the mouseover effect. With JavaScript disabled, you just get the plain map.

If the map does not appear, you are probably using a very old browser. In that case, try downloading and switching to Firefox, a modern, fast, browser with lots of good features. Or at the very least upgrade to the latest version of IE.

The software to produce the new map with the mouseovers was written by a professional web developer, Eric Paulson of Viking Web Development. While I know a thing or two about web design, I'm not a professional web developer. You can tell the difference. Thank you, Eric.

In addition, two new user-supplied enhancements are now available. Dietrich Ayala, a senior web developer, has written a web services interface to this site, complete with WSDL definition for the SOAP interface. The method is registered at xmethods.net.

Ryan N. Freebern, a professional web designer and blogist, has written a Flash applet that interfaces to this website. Using this applet it is possible to place a small 'icon' on a web page. When that page is loaded or refreshed, the applet goes to this site, fetches the electoral-vote score, and displays it on the web page. It also serves as a hyperlink to this site. To get instructions for installing the applet, click here.

A new enhancements link has been added to the menu below the map so you can find these and any future enhancements. These enhancements are all third-party contributed code, so please direct any questions to their respective authors.

-- The votemaster Electoral college