1. The first consequence of Former Secretary of State Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama was an downpour of donations to the latter's campaign. But this endorsement might also sway independent voters. Listen to a discussion about this latest development what is means for Obama but more importantly what it means for Powell and his legacy as a politician.
2. Remember that Obama declined the public financing scheme (limited to $84M) so that he could raise and spend more money on ads and on local campaign offices. Recently, the Obama camp has opened even more local operations on battleground states which now seem to be within the Senator's grasp : Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada.
For more details on the electoral map, I can not commend enough the NPR map, showing predictions for each state and the projected number of electoral votes for each candidate : John McCain's 163 tailing Obama's 273. Reminder: to win the election, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes and all states are winner take all (even if you win by a very slim margin you take all the electoral votes apportionned to that state) except in Nebraska and Maine where the electoral votes are distributed according to the "Congressional District Method".
3. The NYTimes offers an excellent coverage of the ad blitz that has been going on for a couple months. It will tell you how much each candidate and each support group has spent on ads, where they were aired and what the total cost of each ad was. You will see that Obama has widely outspent McCain ( $145M to $90M) but that the Republican National Committee (RNC) with about $10M is far ahead of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
At the top of the page you can select the ads by issuer : B. Obama, J. McCain, RNC, DNC and many other groups campaigning on the behalf of one or the other candidates, such AFL-CIO, the most important labor union in the country criticizing McCain's commitment to the Iraq war and his health care policies, or that with a very modest budget and in a very localized area the conservative group American Issues Project hammering Obama's terrorist connection with Ayers from the Weather Underground.
At the bottom of the page you will find links that show the advertisement breakdown by subject : taxes, environment/energy; gas/oil; jobs... By selecting a topic you can measure how important each issue is for each candidate: for instance I was surprised to see that Obama has spent more money running ads on taxes than his opponent, whereas McCain outspends the Democratic candidate on ads concerned with the environment. Basically what this reveals is that the candidates are spending more money on the issues which aren't the strongsuits of their parties.
The maps are very instructive and some of them help delineate the battle-ground states and the geographical spread of the issues.
The most interesting feature of this web page is that it provides you with a great amount of information and lets you analyse it.
What else?
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