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In today’s edition:

• What writers see from their states this election year
• Stop reading presidential election polls!
• Living on the edge in landslide California

Forecasting November, Part I

Seven months from now, if all goes as planned, we will know who’s going to be leading this country for the next four years. But what if, like the impatient toddlers we are, we want to know now? It certainly doesn’t help for Post staffers to survey our neighbors, here in this bright blue city with its chattering political class on top. We have to look farther afield.

This week, we did just that. Five writers were kind enough to send us election-year postcards, of a sort, from Florida, Washington state, Georgia, Pennsylvania and California. Some are funny, some more grim. They report angry banners, shrugs of ennui and local politicians warning ominously of drug-addled bears (okay, one of the writers is Dave Barry, obviously).

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One set of insights comes from nonfiction writer Melissa Fay Greene, who smartly enlisted an Atlanta-area real estate agent to tell her about who’s moving in and how they’re affecting her increasingly purple state. As this agent helps newcomers and Atlantans find homes in the burbs, she has a front-row seat to how the electorate is changing. Some even see Georgia’s swinginess as a draw: One family, she reports, “literally told me that once all the other priorities checked out, they wanted a state where their votes would matter.” Believe me, we Washingtonians get it.

We’ll be checking back with these writers as Election Day approaches, so stay tuned for more of what they’re seeing on the ground.

Forecasting November, Part II

Say you’re not an anecdata kind of person — you want cold, hard numbers. Perhaps you can deduce our future from polls. That’s what a serious person (who, uh, demanded to know the future) would do, right?

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Think again, says Jen Rubin. The........

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