The tight race

A commenter in a thread on polling last week took me — and the rest of the media — to task for mentioning national poll numbers when, in fact, we elect our presidents via the electoral college. The post was about the gains the McCain campaign has made in the last few weeks.

The commenter is right of course, which is why this piece of news is fairly interesting. For the first time since the campaign started, individual state polls show John McCain with more electoral votes than Barack Obama, according to electoral-vote.org.

It turned largely on the strength of new polls in Ohio, Nevada and Virginia. McCain has outpolled Obama in those three states where previously Obama had held the edge.

McCain “shares” are also trading higher than Obama on the Intrade Web site.