In this video, posted by the John McCain 2008 campaign account on Youtube, campaign manager Rick Davis lays out the roadmap to a McCain presidency, using currently-available polling data to crunch the numbers on the electoral prospects. This is the same Rick Davis that will be serving as the poster-child for how the McCain campaign is largely run by lobbyists, something that may not reflect well upon the candidate come November, but that’s beside the point.

Some of the numbers are cooked (for example they site the burn rate on the Obama and McCain campaigns for April of 2008, when McCain was essentially unopposed and Obama was still working on beating Clinton), but the electoral map is quite interesting. The list of expected battleground states has expanded from Ohio, Florida, and Missouri back in 2000 and 2008 to include a number of areas we used to think of as fairly safe bets. Now, I’m not actually expecting Michigan to go for McCain, or for Obama to win Arkansas, but we can reasonably expect to see both of these candidates working hard to make a showing in places that haven’t seen a presidential candidate outside of the primary season in fifty years.

Rick Davis’s take on things aside (it’s his job to paint a rosy picture; note that he didn’t put Georgia in play), it’s currently Obama’s race to lose. McCain’s hitching his wagon to an unpopular horse on too many issues, whether people identify themselves as moderate or not.