For what it's worth, it would seem that another one of Time Magazine's Mark Halperin's election year predictions seems to be cratering. Back in late August, Halperin penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, in which he threw a wet-blanket on the Obama campaign's strategy of extending the battlefield, and playing for a big electoral win. At the time, Halperin compared Obama's ambitions to Bush's "high stakes gamble" to win California in 2000, alleging that the Obama camp's plans, "could be his undoing."
Halperin's advice was basically for Obama to, essentially, play it safe, and, rather than employ a fifty-state strategy, stay at home in the old Democratic party battlegrounds of the previous elections: "Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada and a handful of smaller states." Virginia and Colorado, he surmised, "will be tough for him to win." Ultimately, however, Halperin said of the task at hand:
Obama's safest bet is to make sure he holds the battleground states Kerry won and then pick up enough of the others to get his 270. At this point, even matching Kerry in the battleground states is not a sure thing -- Michigan, for example, is being fiercely contested by the Republicans.
Of course, since then, the McCain campaign has abandoned Michigan. Obama is up in both Colorado and Michigan. And of the states Halperin identified as "Democratic party battlegrounds, only Florida, Ohio, and Nevada remain true battlegrounds. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa are now pretty solidly in Obama's column. Meanwhile, McCain has been forced to campaign in Pensacola and Omaha. He's sent Sarah Palin to Maine and West Virginia.
Where are the new battlegrounds? Nate Silver has the geographic update:
[Source: Fivethirtyeight.com]
As you can see, Silver places West Virginia as a pure toss-up state, and indicates that McCain's electoral battle forces him to take the fight to such states as Indiana, Arkansas, and North Dakota!
So, ultimately, if the Obama campaign's plan was to broadly compete, engage in all states, and shift the traditional battlegrounds to the Democrats' benefit, I'd have to say that so far, that strategy is looking pretty sound! Come election day, Halperin will have to issue some substantial revisions. On the other hand, as our excellent intern from the University of North Carolina, Bolu Adeyeye, will tell you, I was insisting throughout the summer that the Tarheel state was going to become a battleground in the race, so I'd say I'm looking pretty good right about now.