Readers — My apologies for not posting more often this week. I’m going to have an item up each [week]day from here on out. To gets things started off on the right foot, here’s the Electoral Map’s Daily Compass for today.

The big questions this week: Will the sun shine on Rudy Giuliani next Tuesday? And has Barack Obama built a winning coalition in South Carolina?

• Carl Leubsdorf analyzes Rudy’s big gamble: “The former mayor’s support has begun to drop in his supposed coastal strongholds.”
• And Campaigns & Elections asks, “Can Giuliani Re-Draw the Map?”
• Mort Kondracke examines the GOP Suburban Caucus, reppin’ “from San Diego to Connecticut.”
• Kurtz anticipates the Super Tuesday battle for “New York and California and all the super duper states in between.”
• Ex-Hotliners Reid Wilson and Kyle Trygstad interview John Ensign about the Senate electoral map.
• E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin at Map the Candidates have Dems hitting the Palmetto State and GOPers soaking up the Sunshine State.
• Ambinder looks at Obama’s demograhpics: “Obama’s South Carolina coalition bodes well for him in other Southern states, such as Alabama and Georgia, where wave after wave of white working-class voters have deserted the Democratic Party. But in the largest states voting on Tsunami Tuesday, February 5, (California, New Jersey, and New York) and in later-voting large states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas), the party’s changing demographics work against Obama.” (subscription required)
• Jonathan Martin reports that Huck wants to “build a massive highway from Bangor, Maine, to Miami.”
• Condé Nast Portfolio presents the map of union membership in the United States. Notice how it mirrors the traditional electoral map. What came first the chicken or the egg?

Union Membership by State, 2007

The Presidential Electoral Map, 2004