It's the 1st of August--Do You Know Where Your Candidate Is?

It's been a week of relentless attack by McCain and the GOPer chorus, as well as some members of the hot air media, and it ends with the Gallup tracking poll tied. So these are anxious times for Obama?

First of all, a video message that fellow contributors received today from the Obama campaign says that these attacks helped generate some 200,000 campaign contributions this week, and 100,000 yesterday alone, the last day of the month (on the last day of June, the Obama campaign took in almost as much as the McCain campaign did all month, perhaps in honor of my birthday, or maybe not.) A third of these contributors were new. Also during the month, Obama field offices opened all over the place, and after these attacks, volunteers were "pouring in."

As for the polls, the head-to-head national polls using whatever method still show Obama ahead, but the states are where the electoral votes are, and they look very good for Obama. Reviewing the most recent ones, FiveThirtyEight concluded: This is generally a pretty good set of polling for Barack Obama. Abstract these numbers for a moment. If you had told a Democrat a year ago that, on the last day of July, their candidate would be ahead in Ohio and Florida, well ahead in Pennsylvania , way ahead in California, tied in Montana, within single digits in a couple of states that went really red in 2000 and 2004, they'd be pretty thrilled with that set of polling."

Recall for a moment that John Kerry came with a few electoral votes of being elected President in 2004. The Gallup demographic data shows that Obama is scoring higher than Kerry in every demographic group, except that he's a few points behind in Democrats as a whole--he's winning them 80%-11%. Obama is now showing great strength in virtually every poll among Latinos--and that could be the ball game right there.

Speaking of the final score, Kos posted his monthly analysis, based on pollster.com aggregates of the polls of the month, and he calculates that Obama is winning 336 electoral votes to McCains 202. His June analysis showed Obama ahead 317 to 221. So Obama gained ground in July. The Obamagic number is 270.

Of course the race is still changing, but remember again: John Kerry was only a few electoral votes short--and factor this from Kos: Obama is winning all the Kerry states, most of them with bigger margins than Kerry won them. So Obama has a base of 210 safe votes. McCain has all of 72.

And we haven't had the conventions, we haven't had the debates, and the real ground game campaign is a month away from really beginning (although off the radar, the Obama army is registered voters all over the place.)

It's no time for complacency. But it's certainly no time for panic.

Convention news: Hillary Clinton will be the keynote speaker on Tuesday of convention week, and her name will not be entered in nomination.