Electoral maps put together by the consulting firm helmed by Karl Rove, and obtained by ABC News, show Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, to be a stronger general election candidate in a hypothetical general election match-up against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., than Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.
Karl Rove & Co.’s maps show McCain leading Obama by 238 electoral votes to 221. Connecticut, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, and Virginia (with a total of 79 electoral votes) are toss-ups (within a margin of error of +/- 3 points).
Clinton leads McCain by 259 electoral votes to 206; Connecticut, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and New Mexico (with a total of 73 electoral votes) are toss-ups.
Just for fun — and especially in view of Rove’s well-earned reputation for peddling delusional math — I compared Rove’s math with that of SurveyUSA, who came out with a similar analysis (based on a state-by-state horse-race) in the first week of March.
SurveyUSA had Obama beating McCain 280-258 and Hillary beating McCain 276-262. Rove’s first-week-of-March results show Obama beating McCain 252-216 (with 70 toss-up votes) and Hillary getting trounced by McCain 172-282 (with 84 toss-up votes).
The Obama results can be said to be similar; the Clinton results are poles apart. But Karl Rove is now a respectable journalist. He has no incentive to do anything other than present an objective analysis. His numbers must be fair and balanced.
Hillary Clinton has certainly rushed to embrace this new, objective incarnation of Karl Rove. She has been straining to claim she leads Obama by some metric. The best she has been able to come up with (the only thing, actually) is the claim that she leads in the popular vote—if you squint just so, and count the votes from the mock elections in Michigan and Florida that so many voters didn’t bother to vote in because everyone (including our Hillary) had unambiguously agreed they shouldn’t and wouldn’t count. This argument of hers doesn’t exactly have much traction outside the circle of die-hard Clinton supporters.
So naturally Hillary loves the Karl Rove & Co. analysis. She’s not only brandishing it already on the campaign trail as proof that she is (or should be) the anointed one, it took her just a few hours to climb on board. Jake Tapper’s post is timestamped 1:48 pm. Clinton was quoting it later the same afternoon. So “rushed to embrace” is exactly right.