Comparing 2008 and 2004

There's been a lot of talk lately about Obama slipping in the polls, and what that will mean come November. Now, I still think he's in the driver's seat, especially given that McCain has never really been anywhere near 50%. Reading some stuff at electoral-vote.com backs that up some. Here's a graph showing their electoral college numbers, assuming the polling data accurately reflects what's going on:



Clearly, you see Obama losing a lead there. And that's pretty comparable to what happened to Kerry in 2004:



That's scary, right? But there's a huge difference. Let's look at the same data, but get rid of the leaners, the states where the polling is within 5%:




What do we see here? Obama continues to widen his lead on McCain, while McCain stagnates almost 100 votes short. Obama needs a lot fewer things to break his way to get over the top. Again comparing that to 2004, we see that the situation there was fundamentally different:


http://electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/ec_graph-2004-solid.png

By this time relative to the election (which was well after the swiftboating), Kerry wasn't anywhere near 270 when looking at the states he was doing well in, and Bush actually held the lead for a good chunk of the time as we got closer to the election.