Identifying the battlegrounds

One of Ben Smith's readers makes an interesting catch: the Obama campaign will air Barack's first general election ad in four states that the campaign hadn't previously signalled as targets, and dropped three states that it had. Added: AK, IN, MT, and ND. Dropped: OR, NJ, and WA.

I don't know what the internal deliberations are inside the Obama campaign, but here's some external validation that they are doing the right thing: when Nate Silver assessed Obama's initial target list, he identified IN, MT, and ND as states that should be added, and FL, GA, OR, and WA as states that should be dropped. Nate then subsequently made the case for putting AK in play.

That means there's an overlap in six of the seven changes made by the Obama campaign (NJ is the only exception). I don't know if the Obama camp reads Nate's blog or not, but I do know that Nate is a smart guy, and it's a good sign that the Obama campaign and he have identified more or less the same set of states. (The biggest gap is probably on Georgia -- I've been meaning to write a little about that and will get to it soon.)