Opinion: Battleground bucks favoring Barack Obama over John McCain
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With Barack Obama on vacation and John McCain maintaining a schedule light on generating news, we decided to poke around at the Open Secrets site, to see where the money is going from donors in likely battleground states.
Advantage: Obama.
Now we realize where the donations come from does NOT mean that the votes will follow. But it’s still interesting to take the measure of it. Below is The Times’ interactive map of states, with the battleground states defined as those in which the margin of 2004 victory was less than 8 percentage points.
Now we go over to Open Secrets and look at its tables of states and political contributions. For the purposes of these tables, we’re leaving out the withdrawn candidates. And the totals include primaries, which skews the results a bit for Obama since the Democratic fight was more protracted than the Republican fight. But it’s still interesting to mull.
State | McCain raised | Obama raised | advantage |
Colorado | $1,791,828 | $3,386,366 | Obama |
Delaware | 208,016 | 230,955 | Obama |
Florida | 9,793,200 | 8,092,536 | McCain |
Iowa | 254,430 | 644,961 | Obama |
Michigan | 2,942,741 | 2,467,003 | McCain |
Minnesota | 1,215,608 | 1,786,394 | Obama |
Missouri | 1,359,332 | 1,988,004 | Obama |
Nevada | 1,147,931 | 751,545 | McCain |
New Hampshire | 538,505 | 945,474 | Obama |
New Jersey | 2,990,941 | 4,727,378 | Obama |
New Mexico | 319,863 | 1,192,070 | Obama |
Ohio | 1,866,001 | 2,134,689 | Obama |
Oregon | 650,964 | 1,813,428 | Obama |
Pennsylvania | 2,575,068 | 4,942,149 | Obama |
Washington | 1,317,906 | 4,995,383 | Obama |
Wisconsin | 831,661 | 1,378,850 | Obama |
-- Scott Martelle