Your biggest state surprise...

[minionofmidas]

By who they voted for - Wisconsin. Not that it was much of a surprise.
By margin - Well Vermont is extremely odd. I mean, a 10-point Dem swing while the nation swings 4-point Rep???
On places, West Virginia because it broke my heart, Alabama because I don't think anyone guessed that this would be the strongest pro-Bush swing, and New York because the outcome ther is exactly what my poll overage said it would be and I still think it came out of the blue.

[minionofmidas]

I almost had a heartattack when they said VA and NC were to close to call. lol

CNN also, later on, had trouble calling Mississippi and Montana. Wonder what that was for?

[minionofmidas]

I should have trusted my trash little weighted poll average thingy - I would have got only WI wrong then.
Instead, I moved the three closest Bush states, OH, IA and NM, into the Kerry column - and they end up being just that, the three closest Bush states...

[minionofmidas]

Kerry got slaughtered in the Tennessee Valley part of the state, where Gore won a couple of counties.
He also got slaughtered in the "Little Dixie" area of Oklahoma - there was a midsized cluster of Dem counties there on the 2000 map. It's gone without a trace.
Oddly, despite the fact that Bush gained big in Tennessee, there's quite a few rural Tenn. Democratic counties left. I would have expected to see something similar to Northern Alabama in Central Tennessee.

[minionofmidas]

did a dem win without west virginia?

Wilson lost it in 1916!? Amazing...
Anyways, these "not since" things are misleading. Before 1992, no Democrat had ever won without carrying Texas since it became a state.

[minionofmidas]

Big mistake on what I said about Vermont. I meant that Kerry would win by 10-15%.

Oh. I was already wondering.
As per NJ: Yes there were a handful of polls that showed it round about tied, but the poll average was Kerry by 6. It's still one of the strongest Rep trends around...