It's still a long way to the election, but I think Kerry must be pretty happy with the way things are looking right now. In fact, I've just completed my own assessment of where we are at the moment, and it seems to me that Kerry should be able to get enough Electoral Votes to put him over the top. What's interesting is that I reached that conclusion even though I wasn't able to assign Pennsylvania (21 votes) to either candidate, or Missouri (11), Minnesota (10), Tennessee (10), or Colorado (9), for that matter. [And now I've also put Wisconsin (10) into that category. -- Ed]

Here's how I arrived at my conclusion, using election figures from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections:

I start with a bunch of assumptions. First that there are 12 states (CA, CT, DC, HI, IL by 12.01, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT), representing 168 votes, which are safe for the Democrats. Gore won all of these states by more than 15% in 2000, except Delaware (13.06%) and Vermont (9.94%). (Originally, I was going to set 10% as the cut-off point for considering a state to be "safe", but nobody that I can find is projecting Vermont to be anything but Democratic in 2004, so I made an exception in it's case.)

For the GOP, 18 states (AL, AK, GA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MS, MT, NE, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TX, UT, WY), with 148 votes, are safe. Again, Bush won all of these in 2000 by over 15%, except Georgia (11.69%) and North Carolina (12.83%).

That leaves 21 states, representing 222 electoral votes, as the "battleground" or "swing" states. Nine of these states (IA, ME, MI, MN, NM, OR, PA, WA, WI), with 92 votes, went Democratic in 2000, while 12 of them (AZ, AR, CO, FL, LA, MO, NV, NH, OH, TN, VA, WV), with 130 votes, went for the GOP.

I looked at each of these 21 states individually, and tried to determine, on the basis of polls and other information easily available to me, how they might go in the next election.

The rest of the post, which, as I've said, I'm still laboring over, looks at each state and provides the information I've used to make the assignment.