Wednesday Afternoon

On the 'net, you can find several hundred maps of the U.S. with states indicated as red, blue and toss-up to denote who's likely to capture which electoral votes. The maps vary a lot, especially around the swingable states, but every one I've seen has Barack Obama well over the 300 mark.

With one exception. Over on DailyKos, they reproduce this map which they say is from Bill O'Reilly. It has Obama at 183, McCain at 189 and the rest marked as too close to call.

In order to make this happen, O'Reilly's crew had to do things like declare Iowa too close. Every poll out there has Obama more than ten points ahead in Iowa and McCain has pretty much conceded the state. But I guess O'Reilly needs to give his audience something to hold onto. If that's the idea, he's not doing a very good job. I couldn't find this map in the non-subscription section of the O'Reilly website…but they do reproduce the Real Clear Politics electoral map which currently has Obama at 311. So apparently O'Reilly thinks that two mutually-exclusive polls are credible enough to present. They report, you decide.

And I note that visitors to that site have apparently decided what they want to believe. An online poll asks them to predict who'll win. As of this moment, Obama has 32% and McCain has 68%.