Something I find interesting. Look at all those maps of electoral projections with red states and blue states. People talk about the country as being evenly split and the race as a tossup, but the maps fool your eye because the red has a supermajority of the area of the country.
Yet when you count the individual states on each side, you know what you get?
25 Obama, 25 Romney.
(OK, Obama gets DC as a bonus.)
I’m not sure if the country has ever split exactly in half this way before. I checked the legendarily close elections of 1960, 1968 and 2000 and none of those qualify.
There’s still a good chance Virginia will flip and ruin the symmetry, and other elections will have been closer in popular vote or electoral vote than this looks to be. I still find it interesting. There is no good reason why exactly half the states should be aligned like this. Of course, there is no good reason why a dozen states should have their populations so split that the state is a tossup. This whole election is a statistical anomaly. We may never see one like it again.
Isn’t counting states a bit arbitrary? Not sure if that’s the right word, but consider Montana–it has less than a million people; NYC has over eight. Not that either votes monolithically, but it doesn’t make sense to say things are ‘even’ because a vast area of mostly empty space is equal to a state in which just one city has eight times the population.
Not that things aren’t polling population-wise fairly close, but the state-by-state comparison isn’t a robust metric. Consider looking at maps that adjust for population (sample).
Interestingly, Carter and Kennedy seem to be the only two candidates to win with a minority of the States.
ETA: actually, Jackson won with a minority of states in 1824 as well, but that was because he had several opponents splitting the remainder between them, so he still had the largest number of states of any candidate that year.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t believe this election IS all that even. Obama had a comfortable lead for most of the last year, when the numbers started to mean something, and nearly every indicator, serious and silly, points to another four years for him.
But every election I can recall suddenly turned into a “neck and neck,” “too close to call,” “dead heat,” “even race” in the last weeks. I call BS on the practice, this year and every quadrennial. I think it really is media hypestering because they can’t think of any other way to keep generating headlines as an obvious horse race comes down to the wire.
Obama by a significant margin - that’s been the trend and I’ll stake a virtual wooden nickel on that outcome. Probably greater than 3%, certainly greater than 1%, very unlikely to be a fraction of a percentage lead.
Every election is always the most important in history, every president is either the greatest or worst to ever serve, and every candidate always needs your donations now more than ever.
All you can do is just learn to accept the hyperbole and vote for the better man.
Yes, they are. I wasn’t in any way saying that it was significant, just an odd bit of trivia I found interesting. And thanks to Simplicio for searching out the earlier examples.
How could you forget the Stevenson/Sparkman ticket of 1952? Or the Buchanan/Breckinridge ticket of 1856?
[sub]O.K., so I had to do a little Wikipedia research to find them.[/sub]