Dick Morris' Obamacentric Election Map

Dick Morris is a Fox Commentator, a very smart political operator, and an all round creepy kind of guy. And not necessarily in that order.

He's also created the most Obama-optimistic map I've seen.

My apologies for the fuzziness of my cut and paste job. But the essentials are easy to see. The dark Blue states are solid Obama, light blue leaning Obama, dark red states solidly McCain, and the light red states leaning McCain. The yellow states are toss-ups.

The big development is in the toss-up category. North Carolina is no surprise. Several maps now have North Carolina as leaning Obama. Go Tar Heels. West Virginia isn't that much of a surprise either. But I was shocked to see Morris list Arizona, Louisiana, and Tennessee as toss-ups. And it was almost as shocking to see South Carolina and Georgia as "leaning McCain" rather than strong McCain.

What this map means is that the Solid Republican South is breaking up around McCain. With Florida gone (at least according to Morris), Virginia and North Carolina going, and Tennessee and Louisiana as toss-ups, Morris is posing McCain as a declining force everywhere in the South except Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.

If I'm a Republican looking at the Morris map, I would be horrified. What Morris is implying is that the only "base" that the Republicans can count on is the deep, deep Confederacy, the Plains States, and some of the Mountain States.

As Morris observes, there's only 133 electoral votes in that base.

So what's happening to McCain?

To put it in a nutshell, McCain is driving voters in a number of (perhaps soon-to be-former) Red States toward Obama. McCain adapted conservative policies to win the nomination and started running a hyper-aggressive campaign to keep voters from drifting to Obama.

But now the combination of unpopular policies and constant aggression appears to be driving many voters to Obama instead.

And McCain is driving voters to Obama in states he thought he could count on.