Who's Ahead?

Quite a few websites have sprouted up that attempt to track the electoral vote and to say that certain states are solid for Bush, certain ones lean to Kerry, certain ones are toss-ups, etc. If you cruise them, you'll find a certain consensus. Bush is not going to lose Texas…Kerry is not going to lose New York…and so on. The polls all tell us that a small number of states will be "battleground states" but those polls are not completely in accord as to which states we're talking about.

If you want to track electoral votes, you might want to consult more than one source. This website interprets the polls with a generally conservative slant and this one does so with a generally liberal eye. If they agree, it doesn't necessarily mean that settles matters since they're just compiling a lot of the same polls which may or may not be accurate. But if you're going to believe in polls at this stage of the game, you might as well get a wide sampling.