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Opinion: National electoral map: See-saw struggle as Obama sees, McCain saws

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Here’s the latest national electoral map published by Karl Rove & Co., showing continued gains this month by Sen. Barack Obama.

Things are really heating up. There’ve been 35 new state polls just since last Sunday.

As a result, the Obama-Biden ticket has pulled into a lead in hypothetical electoral votes in the race with Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for the first time since Labor Day when the Republican National Convention started in St. Paul.

The freshman Illinois legislator now has 211 electoral votes to McCain’s 189 with 138 now in the toss-up category. That’s the largest number of toss-up votes since this research started last March.

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The shift from earlier in the week came because McCain lost Florida, whose 27 electoral votes moved from the Arizonan’s column into the toss-up category.

Also, New Hampshire with its whopping four electoral votes slipped from Obama’s grasp into toss-up.

Still, Rove notes, ‘The race remains extremely close. If all of the toss-up votes were allocated to the candidate ahead today in them, Obama would eke out a narrow 273 to 265 electoral vote victory.’

Now, that’s close. The slightest change could affect the outcome.

Now, comes the first presidential debate. We’ll have it all here, live-blogging plus the usual analysis and history.

The study’s methodology is explained on the jump here (Click on the Read more line to get there). And there’s also a chart there showing each week’s results, going back to March. The Ticket will be publishing these results every few days from now through the election.

--Andrew Malcolm

To get immediate alerts of all Ticket items like this and breaking news flashed direct to your cell, go here to Twitter and register free.

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Methodology

For each state, the map uses the average of all public telephone polls (Internet polls are not included in the average) taken within 14 days of the most recent poll available in each state.

For example, if the most recent poll in Montana was taken on July 1, the average includes all polls conducted between July 1 and July 15. States within a three-point lead for McCain or Obama are classified as toss-ups; states outside the three-point lead are allocated to the respective candidate.

There is no polling data available for the District of Columbia, but its three electoral votes are allocated to Obama.

courtesy of Karl Rove & Co.

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