This is what the electoral college map would look like today based on Obama's approval ratings, according to Nate Silver. The map fails to illustrate the switch in Lincoln, Nebraska, but adds up to 445 electoral votes to 93.
Obama flips Arizona (10 electoral votes), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Missouri (11), South Dakota (3) and Tennessee (11).
In Iowa, Obama is sitting at an average of 60.3 percent approval, and if that were translated to electoral margin you'd have to go back to LBJ to see that here (Reagan underperformed in Iowa in `84, the heaight of that era's farm crisis).
Silver acknowledges that it's an oversimplification but makes some interesting points:
Obama's approval ratings are extremely strongly correlated with his November 4 results. If you take his election day total and add 6 points to it, you'll have a very good estimate of his approval rating in that state.
There are a couple of places, though, where there is a little bit of a suggestion that Obama is overperforming or underperforming. His approval ratings are somewhat slack in the Southwest relative to his election day totals, although it is hard to reach a definitive conclusion since we only have one poll to look at in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Conversely, there are some signs that Obama is overperforming in the Inner South or what we sometimes call the "Highlands" region -- states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
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