Iowa and Maine?

There are three little bits of travel trivia that suggest to me that things are not quite sewn up for Mr. Obama as some would like us to believe.

1) Mr. McCain has of course been campaigning in a lot of swing states, but he has hit Pennsylvania very hard. The hits have been hard enough to cause Gov. Rendell to beg Mr. Obama to either come back or to send surrogates to shore things up. It is important to remember that Mr. Kerry only won Pennsylvania by 2.5% (about 144,000 votes). Any reasonable shift in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh or in the Scranton and Bethlehem regions could overwhelm any additional turnout in Philadelphia and turn the state red.

2) Todd Palin has been dispatched to Maine. Mr. McCain has been making a strong push for that extra Electoral Vote in Maine’s second district, but the internal numbers are close enough to suggest that Mr. McCain has an outside shot to take the whole state. Mr. Obama hasn’t seemed to be able to get a better that 5-7 point lead in this state. What’s more, one of the largest aspects of Maine’s economy is family-owned, small business fishermen who tend to bring in between $200,000-$250,000 a year. If many of these fishermen believe that their taxes are going up under an Obama Administration, Mr. Obama’s support in this state could go down in a hurry.

3) Mr. Obama is campaigning in Iowa. Iowa is a state that Mr. Obama should win by better than 5 points simply based on Mr. McCain’s anti-ethanol votes. If Mr. Obama has to take time out of his schedule to swing through Iowa rather than reinforcing Ohio or Virginia that lends itself to an air of danger for him.

I’ll see if I can’t get a slightly better bead on things over the weekend and give my assessment of the overall race on Monday.