Halloween Masquerade

Happy Halloween. First, let's see how Halloween is trying to predict the outcome of the Presidential Election. Amazon tracks sales of Obama and McCain masks. It is surprisingly close to many national polls.

Next, an update on our take on the Electoral Vote breakdown.


This map represents an Electoral Vote count of Obama 291, McCain 142 with 105 uncommitted electoral votes. This is 21 more than the 270 needed to get elected. So even if John McCain were to win all of the uncommitted states on this map (and several of them are already leaning Obama), he would still be 23 Electoral votes short. Hence the desire by the McCain campaign to win Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes, but even that would be short. McCain would need to take another state like Nevada or New Hampshire.

You can see a recent explanation of the CNN Magic Electoral Map here:


If you want to prepare for Election night, look at this map which shows when polls close. We plan to make a post in the next few days taking you through hour by hour on Election night and when states and their electoral votes will be called for one of the 2 candidates.


Finally, there are few things that could have seemed more appropriate on this Halloween than my city of Philadelphia doing one heck of a job masquerading as a city of champions. After 25 years of 4 sports teams failing to win a championship, the Phillies won the World Series on Wednesday night. After several nights of absolutely horrible weather conditions that made playing difficult and/or impossible, the parade today was in beautiful warm sunshine with open blue skies. So for the Phillies, their fans, both John McCain and Barack Obama and all of their supporters, today we leave you with Don't Stop Believing by Journey: