270 To Win

Here's a fun toy that you can mess with until election day.
It's called 270 To Win.
270 is the number of Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
They have an interactive map that will show you the Red State/Blue State (or Green State/Black State if you go back a ways) for every election since George Washington beat the tar out of John Adams in 1789.

Go ahead and mess with it a while. Please come back.....

It's interesting to start in 1960 and watch the Deep South go from Blue to Red to split as the candidates go from Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. (I think that's the correct order.....)

And if you go even further back to the period immediately before the Civil War, the South goes anti-Lincoln Blue, then goes plaid until the 1880's (because of carpetbaggers and the brief period of Black Suffrage???), and then stays Democrat Blue for a long, long time.

Real Clear Politics will eventually have similar maps. But 270 To Win shows you the history going back to day one.