Instructions -- A presidential candidate needs 270 electors to win the national election. Decide which states a candidate must win in order to gain enough electors:

• Shift-Click a state to view a state's past election returns (1980 - 2004). Use this information to predict the winning party for each state in 2008.

• Click in a state once if you think the Republican (red) will win it; twice for a Democrat (blue) win; three times to mark it undecided (yellow). The calculator will automatically tally electors based on your decisions and tell you when a candidate reaches 270. The default scenario shows the 2004 election results.

• You can save your scenario and open a saved scenario from the File menu. Saving writes a small file to your computer. This file is not a browser-readable cookie, and no personally identifiable information is saved. Save your scenario before navigating to other parts of this feature or you will lose your work.

• You can start from historical results by choosing a scenario from the Choose a Scenario menu. All scenarios use the elector allocation derived from the 2000 census.