On these maps, it’s best to treat “lean” and “safe” as “safe” for almost all the examples listed. Also, Karl Rove is a political pundit with his own agenda. He wants to build a narrative that Obama is defeatable, so he will constantly show him slipping/eroding as weeks go by up to election day.
Trust electoral-vote.com or fivethirtyeight.com way more than anything else you find, I’d say. RCP is also pretty good.
I agree with the first statement: Ohio and Florida are the two big must-win swing states for Romney.
However if the election is very close I expect Obama to lose both Ohio and Florida and still have a good chance. Virginia and New Hampshire will be the other very key Eastern states to watch – Obama probably wins if he gets both, despite losing Ohio and Florida. (I assume he wins Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, as expected.) New Hampshire’s paltry 4 votes are less important then the signal – if this Democrat stronghold falls to Romney, expect more bad news as results proceed to the West.
In the case where Romney gets all three of Ohio, Florida and Virginia (but not New Hampshire) Obama still has a significant chance! All he’ll need to do is to sweep the three remaining swing states – Iowa, Colorado, Nevada – in all of which he’s favored as much as or more than in Ohio and Virginia.
But it will be close!* Whether it’s close or not, part of the job is making it seem like an uphill, but winnable, battle, if everybody pitches in.
*In reality, it will be close - Obama could win all the battleground states, of course, leading to a comfortable electoral win, but not a decisive popular vote win.
I am not sure what will be considered close, in 2008 in mid August McCain was within 2% of Obama and then actually took the lead after the Republican Convention. He lost by more than 7% points. I don’t expect it to be that big a swing, but I still think Obama wins by 4-5%
Your #'s are a little higher than my pessimistic soul will allow me to hope. I’m expecting 2% but think there is a slim chance (<1% chance) Obama loses the popular vote but wins the EV.
What a shit storm that would be…
If it makes you feel better, the economy is actually not in too bad shape, not robust, but actually pretty positive.
It is somewhat notable that as close as the popular vote projections are right now it is not all that close from an electoral college perspective.
The Rove site did help suggest one reason for Romney to have gone with Ryan: there are fairly few undecideds out there this time. Those “independents” have mostly already decided. The hope for Romney is that the GOP base comes out large and that the Dem base does not bother. The hope is that Ryan gets that GOP base off their duffs without excessively exciting the Dem base to come out too (and to hope that the voter suppression tactics work very well). Maybe even worth losing some over 65 voters in Florida …
No snark intended, but why do you say that? For sure Fox News would have a field day, and it certainly would be interesting to see how they compare such a pro-Obama outcome to Bush benefiting from the same outcome in 2000. Whether or not such an outcome is a good thing depends on your politics. If such a thing were to happen again I would guess that it just provides another case study for history and pol-sci majors. The constitution is written in such a way to handle such contingencies, and has been effective in doing so in the past.
Then he fucked up big time.
Yeah, I know Karl Rove is an ass, and his job is to make Romney look good. I was just using the posted link as an example.
This was main reason that I started this thread. While I’'m aware that there are states solidly red or blue, I’m not familiar which ones are which. The west coast usually goes blue, that I know. Since people like Rove can predict whatever they want, it don’t mean shit come election night. Once the polls start closing, and the results are called, it’s just a matter of basic math. It’s a game: how many electoral votes does candidate x need to win, and which ones are still in play?
I don’t mean any snark either but you do remember the election of 2000 don’t you? Same thing happened there and there was a moderate shitstorm. The election results weren’t officially settled for weeks as a result. In this case you have a person in office he is already viscerally hated by a very vocal segment of the population. I can only think it would be even worse.
Part of me is actually hoping for that to happen, since for it to happen twice in such rapid succession, to opposite parties, might be just what it takes to build up political will to abolish the electoral college.
And the shitstorm in 2000 wasn’t because of the split between the popular vote and the electoral vote, it was because the results in Florida were close enough that the usual sorts of irregularities were enough that they would have flipped the outcome. Now, granted, such a situation was made much more likely by the existence of the electoral college, but we would still have had the exact same brouhaha if the popular vote had been a fraction of a percentage point in favor of Bush instead of Gore.
I may as well post the electoral map for that scenario. Does that website reuse its mapids? I’d assume the same map has been produced many times, just starting from an assumption that the election will be close.
This is one reason I’m not so eager to abandon electoral college. The recounting of a couple of Florida counties in 2000 almost took on (Alert: Hyperbole ahead) the air of a Seldon Crisis. With popular vote, can you imagine the brouhaha in a close election? Especially if bad weather led to geographic differences in turnout?
Wouldn’t it be lower, by default, than the brouhaha caused by a less popular candidate winning?
I was referring to the possible need for a recount. Given the consternation and alleged difficulty of counting just two Florida counties, imagine a close popular vote, with every vote important.
Early to say.
I suspect most here read 538. Before the VP announcement Nate was making the case for a moderate choice as the bold way to go and specifically stating that Romney had no reason to take a “risky” choice out of desperation (which is when a risky moves makes sense). It’s the latter part of that analysis that I am not so sure about. Nate also notes that the numbers have been pretty consistent, never overwhelming for Obama in popular vote but not moving much. Given the electoral map considerations Nate’s model has consistently given Obama more than 2 to 1 odds of winning with some variation of how much over that. The economy does not look like it is going to implode (Romney’s best chance at victory).
Nate may feel that is not a desperate circumstance but if I was Romney I would. So which “risky” move does he make? Nate’s proposed bold thumb nose at the base and go for the middle (see, we knew he wasn’t really a conservative, the damn Etch-a-Sketch), or one that revs the base at the cost of some of the few remaining undecided swing voters? The gamble is that Ryan will do more good by driving turn-out for his ticket, if just to show their support of Ryan as their new leadership, more than it drives turn-out against them and loses the middle.
Sure it’s a Hail Mary, but given that a Hail Mary may be needed for his side now to have a chance it may not have been any worse of a Hail Mary than any other alternative one he could have thrown. Even for Florida Romney would likely lose the state without a strong turn out from a base that is luke warm on him. Yes, I know that there is also a risk of it costing him turn-out or even driving turn-out to the other side from swing seniors (and I expect such to be the case), but desperate times …
It would be ironic this time around if Romney were to win the popular vote but Obama were to win the electroal votes which is more likely than the other way around simply because of all the states Romney has to win.
The OP: yes, check out 538 in particular the “Tipping point” states. Nate Silver lists, “The probability that a state provides the decisive electoral vote.” Here are the top 5:
1 Ohio 28.3%
2 Va. 16.1%
3 Fla. 13.2%
4 Wis. 9.1%
5 Colo. 7.3%
Together the top 3 total to 57.6%.
538 gives Romney at 30% chance of victory, while Intrade says 42%. How is that possible given your presentation? Nate Silver reminds us that voting patterns are correlated across states. In Karl Rove’s terms, a lot of those leaning Democrat states could peel off all at once – same for the Republican leaners. So Romney’s odds aren’t all that bad. Perhaps the Republican congress sabotaged the economy for naught.
Qin Shi Huangdi: 538 sets odds on some wacky scenarios:
Electoral College tie (269 electoral votes for each candidate) 0.2%
Recount (one or more decisive states within 0.5 percentage points) 6.0%
Obama wins popular vote but loses electoral college 1.8%
Romney wins popular vote but loses electoral college 3.1%
Map exactly the same as in 2008 0.3%
Map exactly the same as in 2004 <0.1%
Obama loses at least one state he carried in 2008 93.2%
Obama wins at least one state he failed to carry in 2008 26.2%
Mitt Romney, the Republican Al Gore.
Anyone else think we’ll find out, after he’s relieved of the burden of running for Prez, that Romney is secretly a very warm, charismatic guy?