Cassidy’s Count: The Obama-Romney Map is Turning Blue

A few days before the first Presidential debate seems like a good time to look at the electoral map, which, at least according to the opinion pollsters, is moving in the direction of Obama and the Democrats. In almost all of the competitive states where the election will be decided, recent surveys show Barack Obama widening his lead, moving ahead, or closing on Mitt Romney. With two hundred and seventy votes in the electoral college needed for victory, projections based on recent polling show the President winning at least three hundred votes, and possibly quite a few more.

Karl Rove and other Republican strategists are suggesting that some polling organizations are overestimating the number of Democratic voters, but that argument is largely a red herring. In many swing states, successive polls carried out by the same pollsters, using the same sampling procedure, have showed Obama gaining ground. Even polling organizations that tend to lean Republican have found the same trend.

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