I'd sure like to know what those 13 states are. I am fairly certain they include MO, FLA, Ohio but who else?
The states with the closest margins last time, in order of closeness:
Florida (Bush .01%)
New Mexico (Gore .06%)
Wisconsin (Gore .22%)
Iowa (Gore .32%)
Oregon (Gore .44%)
New Hampshire (Bush 1.27%)
Minnesota (Gore 2.4%)
Missouri (Bush 3.34%)
Ohio (Bush 3.51%)
Nevada (Bush 3.54%)
Tennessee (Bush 3.87%)
Pennsylvania (Gore 4.17%)
Maine (Gore 5.12%)
Those are the top 13. Here are the next 5:
Michigan (Gore 5.13%)
Arkansas (Bush 5.45%)
Washington (Gore 5.58%)
West Virginia (Bush 6.02%)
Arizona (Bush 6.29%)
One of the things that happened to Gore last time was that two states he thought were not true battlegrounds (Tennessee and West Virginia) went to Bush by fairly comfortable margins. A very interesting and detailed study of the 2000 election describes how the parties each categorized the states into five groups: Base Republican, Marginal Republican, Battleground, Marginal Democratic, and Base Democratic:
la.utexas.edu
The parties classified 42 states and DC in the same manner; they classified 8 states differently from one another (CA, TN, WA, WV, LA, VA, NC, NH).
Gore's campaign identified 13 battleground states. They were: Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Arkansas, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania. (See table 2 about three pages from the end of the linked PDF file).
Bush's campaign identified 16 battleground states:
12 of Gore's 13 (all except Louisiana, which Bush called Marginal Republican), New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia. Gore's campaign had New Hampshire as Marginal Republican, and Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia as Marginal Democratic.
New Hampshire ended up very close and probably belonged in the battleground category. Bush won two of Gore's misclassified "Marginal Democratic" states by a decent margin: Tennessee and West Virginia. One agreed battleground state, Delaware, was actually won easily by Gore; the others were all fairly close. |
