I agree with Jennifer that if Obama cannot win Florida – and the high percentage of retired military there would seem to make his inability to win there a certainty – the electoral college map is much more difficult for him. To beat McCain without Florida, Obama needs to win the states that Bush won in 2004 by a margin of fewer than 5 points. Yet that turns out to be most of the places where Obama has had problems with his own party, like Ohio — or New Mexico, Nevada, and Missouri, where he essentially split the vote with Clinton. He also needs to worry about protecting those states that Kerry won in ’04 by small margins: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Michigan, which haven’t exactly been hothouses of Obamamania. True, Obama has pickup opportunities in Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, and Nevada. But all the math suggests this could be a close race that tosses out a lot of the old red/blue assumptions.

Whatever your conclusion, it should be clear to serious students of the electoral college that the presidential race is really focused on about ten battleground states. The fact that Obama had a huge win in North Carolina is essentially irrelevant in November, something that Newsweek, “Good Morning America,” et al. never seem to get.