Palpatines wrote:
The whole he can't win a big state card is not going to go away now.
It's largely meaningless. Obama has as much chance of losing California in the general as Clinton has of losing Illinois.
Even in Pennsylvania, both Democratic candidates hold a 8%+ lead in polling over McCain. You'd be better off focusing your argument on Ohio and Florida.
Just for giggles (I find giggles in odd places), here's the polling vs. McCain in states with 15+ electoral votes. I picked 15 because it was large enough to include states such as Michigan which received attention last election. I'm calling a 1% range a tie (45-44, etc). I imagine the MOE is greater than that from poll to poll but I'm not submitting a PoliSci thesis here either. I'm taking my state-by-state data from
Electoral-Vote.com
State EVs Win Tie Lose
=================================================
California 55 C/O
New York 31 C/O
Texas 34 O C
Florida 27 C O
Illinois 21 C/O
Pennsylvania 21 C/O
Ohio 20 C O
Michigan 17 O C
Georgia 15 C/O
New Jersey 15 O C
North Carolina 15 O C
That gives us:
Clinton with 148 Electoral Votes "won" and 42 "tied"
Obama with 160 Electoral Votes "won" and 49 "tied"
Hardly a sweeping "large state" argument for Clinton. Again, I'll grant allowances that some of the polling is older and there's varied margins of error, etc. You could also cut off the 15 EV states but that would just essentially tie Clinton & Obama in "wins" and "ties". No matter how you look at it, Clinton's "large state" argument doesn't really hold up and the superdelegates are going to be presented with the actual math, not just "Clinton won California and New York!".
Edited, Apr 23rd 2008 12:13am by Jophiel