McCain, Obama Aim to Redraw Electoral Map

JUDY WOODRUFF:

As the general election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama kicks off in earnest, both candidates claim that they can poach voters from the other's turf and redraw the electoral map.

Well, here to tell us which states they see as the battlegrounds heading into November are Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report, and Amy Walter, she's editor-in-chief of the Hotline, National Journal's political daily.

Hello to both of you. And before we look at this map and how you think these states are leaning, we're almost five months away from the election. Tell us what you're basing these estimations on at this point, Amy.

AMY WALTER, Editor-in-Chief, The Hotline:

Well, the one thing that we shouldn't base them on today is looking at polling. There are a whole bunch of people who are looking at…

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Shouldn't?

AMY WALTER:

Should not, because it's still way too early. Most of these polls that have been taken in these states, for example, they were a month or two months old. And they really reflected, I think in many ways, what was going on in the primary election between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, not so much about where voters necessarily sit today. So I'm a little wary about using the polls there.

But I think you need to look at a couple of things, obviously, past election results, and not just the Bush number or the Kerry number or the Gore numbers, but look at how they played in 2006, how federal candidates did in some of these states.

And then demographic changes, some states that were competitive even in 2004 have changed dramatically because of influx of new voters or just in terms of where the issue focuses today. It makes a state that maybe looked more reliably situated in one party leaning toward the other.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

What would you add to that?

STUART ROTHENBERG, Rothenberg Political Report:

I'd simply add to what extent we are looking at some polling, and that's the national numbers, because when you look at states, you compare them to the national performance and to other states.

So I assume — I think both Amy and I are figuring that this contest, at this point, looks close. Therefore, you have to look to the swing states that in the past, the past few election cycles, have really been in the middle.

And as Amy points out, you look to changes. So we look at, for example, Virginia and Colorado, where Democrats have done very well in some of these recent statewide races, and we see something else going on.

There's one other thing, Judy, some seat-of-the-pants analysis. So Barack Obama does not do very well among blue-collar, working-class, white Democrats. That gets our attention. We look at West Virginia and Kentucky, where they're important, and we downgrade, I think, his showing there.