This atlas of US election results is great fun. Beyond doing things like looking at the picture of blue counties and red counties it also has an electoral college calculator which includes the changes in electoral votes from last decade till now.

Incidentally, the first calculation I made was Dems hold all the Gore states plus NH (they like Dean, he's a new englander) and Nevada (I hear they hate Bush, some nuclear dumping issue) now results in a dead electoral tie. The odds of this split are really quite nontrivial...

Oddly enough in the past 4 years though I've gone from chearing for weird entertaining things like electoral ties to actually really caring about the outcome of the election. I wonder if this is a result of any change in my actual positions or just the result of our having such a terrible president. I think in 2000 I really didn't have any clue that Bush was going to be anything like what he is.

Speaking of maps and elections, does anyone know of anyone who does state by state presidential polling? I'd love to see a state by state breakdown currently of who would vote Bush and who would vote Dean... The roughly 15% gap currently in polls, which states is that coming from? Does Dean already hold CA, NY, new england, etc.? Is he way behind in PA or not? FL? MI? etc. All these national polls are useless, cause we don't have a national election. And even though historically the national vote is closely corrolated with the winner (2000 aside), the nation is so polarized right now that I wouldn't expect the national numbers to reflect the electoral breakdown at all.

So anyone know where one can find the numbers that actually matter?