The Note hedges

ABC News' The Note was the first to come up with this brilliant description of this year's electoral map: Whoever goes 2 for 3 in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania will win the presidency. Fair enough. It's about the only cardinal rule of this year's electoral map that seems without dispute.

Well, not so fast. The Note is now hedging, saying in today's edition that:

The Note was, we say semi-proudly, among the first to point out the likelihood that the winner of two of three of the Big Three (Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio) would almost certainly take the White House, but it has become a dangerous myth and we are going to do our best to dispel it today. The president's Electoral College advantage shows that this isn't necessarily the case, at least not for Senator Kerry.

Somehow, the Note believes that Kerry could win Ohio - a state the Democrats lost by 4% in 2000- and manage to lose Iowa and New Mexico, both states Gore narrowly won, not to mention Florida, a state Al Gore really did win.

It just sounds like a whole lotta crap to us. Looking at the numbers coming out of the battlegrounds over the weekend (both public and private) suggests Kerry is doing better and better there, some might even call it surging?

Also, there is the fact that Bush has not visited Ohio since October 2, and as of this writing has no immediate plans to do so. If Bush is slipping in Ohio that can hardly be called "an electoral advantage" even if Karl Rove tells you so.