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 FROM THE EDITOR The Wall Street Journal editorial page launched this Web site on July 28, 2000, just before the Republican National Convention. OpinionJournal.com expanded the page's ability to cover the 2000 presidential campaign, chiefly by allowing us to publish articles much more quickly than we could have were we constrained by a newspaper publication cycle. (See, for instance, this Bob Bartley column recapping our coverage of the George W. Bush DUI story, or this John Fund column with a Sunday night Florida re-re-recount update.)
This year we're taking advantage of the technology in a new way. Political cartography buffs have long been fascinated by those Electoral College projection maps, which show the states in which the two party nominees are leading. But what if your local paper publishes a map and you think it has a state or two wrong?
Introducing the OpinionJournal.com Electoral College Calculator. Click here or on the left-hand navigation bar, and a window will pop up with this nifty interactive map. (Note: The preceding link will work only if you're reading this article on OpinionJournal.com. If it's been e-mailed to you, click here to go to the site.) The ECC is the brainchild and the work of Christian Knoebel, the producer of our site. He's the guy we "content providers"--Webspeak for writers and editors--call on when we need help with the technical side of things.
We figured the Republican base consists of the states George W. Bush won by a margin of at least 7%, plus Tennessee, where Bush's 3.6% margin was surely closer than it would have been were it not for Al Gore's connections to the state. The Democratic base, likewise, consists of those states in which Mr. Gore won by more than 7%.
Of course, part of the fun of prognosticating is that little can be taken for granted. There's always the possibility of an outcome so one-sided that one party carries many states in the other's base, as Republicans did in 1980, 1984 and 1988 and Bill Clinton did (to a lesser extent) in 1992 and 1996. John Kerry, for instance, is eyeing Louisiana (Bush by 7.7% in 2000), while there are polls showing surprising strength for Mr. Bush in places like New Jersey (Gore by 15.8%).
States also have been known to change party loyalty. The hapless Michael Dukakis managed to carry only 10 states in 1988, which you'd think would be solidly Democratic. But six of them--Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin--are too close to call this time around. On the other hand, of the 11 states in today's Democratic base, four--California, Illinois, New Jersey and Vermont--went Republican in every election from 1968 through 1988.
More features: There's a pull-down menu you can use to color the entire map red, blue or yellow, or call up the results of the previous six elections. (If you do the latter, the vote totals shown will be for 2004, not the year in question--so that, for example, the 2000 scenario gives Mr. Bush 278 electoral votes instead of the 271 he had that year.) Another pull-down menu allows you to save your own scenario and call it up again later. Shift-click on a state to bring up a capsule description of its voting history. And the menu tab marked "articles" takes you to a library of articles on presidential elections--some from 2000, some from this year, some previously published only in our paid e-mail newsletter, Political Diary. (Click here for information on subscribing.)
We'll change the default scenario as events (new polling, Mr. Kerry's vice presidential choice, etc.) warrant. Have fun.
By reading "Presidential Leadership," you'll learn who were the best presidents, who were the worst and why--information you can use as you mull your choices this November.
Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com.
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