Paths to victory
Right now I'm tracking two websites trying to figure out how the electoral college will go based on latest polling data:
http://www.270towin.com/ (A) is one of my favorite websites for tracking how things are going and when there are 12 or fewer toss-up states, they start putting up a statistical % chance based on those polls for who will win.
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/election2008/2008-election-map.html#/president-nprOvM/ (B) is my next favorite. It doesn't give the exact same results, but I also generally trust NPR as a news source.
So looking at these two, we see at (A) they're saying Obama has 186, so he has to put together 84 electoral votes from somewhere–looks like a shoestring catch. At (B) they're saying Obama has 217, but they're giving him MN and WI, so he needs 53 votes, which could come out of MI, OH, and PA.