Driving back home to Virginia Beach from the debacle at the Sporting News, I realized I was going to be mighty depressed once I unpacked. What should I do with all the spare time I suddenly had on my hands? And then it struck me: We had a month until the next election. Why not try to sell my usual Election Day preview as a freelance project? I updated the grid, rewrote the Electoral College primer as a Q&A and offered the thing to every editor I had ever met. I managed to land 14 clients, including the Detroit Free Press, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This particular one ran in the Baltimore Sun. I built to suit each client with sizes and fonts. What a project. November 2008.