Rasmussen: Obama 300, McCain 174

Rasmussen Reports projection released this afternoon shows Sen. Barack Obama with a lead of 300-174 electoral votes when leaners are included in the count.

This is the first polling that shows Obama earning 300 electoral votes.

New state polling from Oregon has moved that state from "Leans Democratic" to "Likely Democratic" in the Rasmussen Reports Balance of Power Calculator. With this change, Obama leads in states with 255 Electoral College votes while McCain is ahead in states with 163 Electoral College votes. When “leaners” are included, it’s Obama 300, McCain 174.

Currently, states with 63 Electoral College votes are leaning slightly in one way or the other. Five states with a total of 64 votes -- North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia -- are pure toss-ups.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has a bleaker picture for Sen. John McCain.

With 25 days to go until the election, Barack Obama is presently at his all-time highs in four of the six national tracking polls (Research 2000, Battleground, Hotline and Zogby) and is just one point off his high in Gallup. He has emerged with clear leads in both Florida and Ohio, where there are several polls out today. He is blowing McCain out in most polls of Pennsylvania and Michigan, and is making states like West Virgina and Georgia competitive.

There's just nothing in there for McCain to hang his hat on. Even a pollster like Strategic Vision, which has generally had a Republican lean this cycle, now has Florida and Ohio going against them (Florida in a big way). Well, OK, maybe they'll hold on to Indiana, although both campaigns' internals likely have the state closer than Rasmussen does.

McCain is getting some criticism for campaigning in Iowa, and for sending Sarah Palin out to West Virginia, but the truth is that their electoral hand is so poor right now that it doesn't much matter in which states they're deciding to bide their time. Remember, any world in which McCain has a chance to win on Election Day is a world that looks very different from this one -- some significant event will have to have occurred to fundamentally change the momentum of the race. We don't know which states might be affected disproportionately by such an event, and so a lot of states are conceivably worth attacking or defending, any of which could potentially become more important in the face of unknown unknowns.