The Intrade Realtime Electoral Vote Predictor is looking pretty grim for the GOP's McCain-Palin ticket. No doubt the economic crisis has contributed a great deal to the widening lead of the Obama-Biden ticket. But despite perfervid and increasingly desperate help from blogosphere partisans choosing her was a serious blunder that is also alienating those good folks in the GOP who actually read newspapers and magazines for information -- and can name them. Now there are even suggestions from columnists at the National Review [sic!] that Ms. Palin do the GOP a favor and withdraw from the race, say, for personal reasons. (I suppose she could make the announcement during the upcoming debate with Joe Biden, that is, if the latter doesn't forget to press his MUTE button, often.)
For those who don't like the new-fangled prediction market polls like Intrade, there a number of interesting and highly analytical "poll of polls" including one of my favorites, Hominid Views, which also publishes a map that is scaled to the number of electoral votes each state casts (and therefore scales with the state population) instead of the usual geographic map. HV is calling the race for Barack Obama, 309 to 229, if it were held today based on the latest state polls.
