Electoral

First let me say I think the Electoral College is outdated and should be abolished, especially in the wake of what happened in 2000. However, I'm not surprised that it hasn't been, nor am I surprised at the lack of movement in that direction. Earlier this summer I read an article on the possibility of McCain winning the college but Obama winning the popular vote-and not by a little, like Gore did in '00, but by several million. At the time is wasn't hard to imagine: Obama winning big in the states he took and losing only by a little in the states he lost. The article quoted an anonymous campaign (McCain's, I think) source as saying that the American public could take an election like that (meaning 2000) once every hundred years, but not twice in eight. I agreed at the time, and I still do, but it's starting to look more and more like that won't happen.



On and off for the past week or two I've been fiddling with CNN's Electoral Map Calculator. It's pretty cool-it let's you assign the states to either candidate, and starts it out based one what their current poll numbers show: safe Obama/McCain, leaning Obama/McCain, or tossup. Before the market blew up I thought there were four possibilities: Obama wins big, Obama wins small, McCain wins small, or a tie, with Obama winning small being the most likely possibility. But over the last couple of weeks Obama winning with an electorally significant margin has become a greater possibility. While there's a decent bit of time left yet, and victory is by no means assured, the math is starting to look imposing for McCain.



CNN's map (again, guided by their current poll numbers) has 264 electoral votes safe or leaning Obama. This includes Maine, who gives 2 votes to the statewide winner, and then one each to the winner of the two congressional districts. I've heard McCain has a shot at one of the district votes (the 2nd, I think), so let's say 263 for Obama. This includes the western seaboard and Hawaii, NM, MN, IA, WI, MI, IL and everything north of DC (including PA). This is hardly an optimistic projection, and it means all Obama would have to do to win is take OH, FL, VA, CO, NC, IN or MO. CNN lists all of these at tossups, but you can get more detail from pollster on each one of those key races. I would be shocked if Obama didn't come away with at least one.



So the question starts becoming how many electoral votes can Obama get? Fivethirtyeight.com lists the most common Obama totals as 375, 380,383, 338 and 381. Personally, when I go through the map I end up coming out somewhere in the 330s. There's one thing in the back of my mind, though. There's been a lot of talk recently about the Bradley effect, which basically is the fear that people are saying they're going to vote for Obama out of fear of appearing racist. The race that keeps coming back to me, however, is the MN gubernatorial race in 1998, when Jesse Ventura won a three-way race because of his ability to get non-traditional voters to the polls. This meant that going into election day, polls of likely voters that had been put in the field hadn't given him much of a chance. Now, I have no idea if or how the 2008 national polls take likely vs non-likely voter into account. But since Obama's candidacy, backed by an excellent organization, turned a lot of first-time voters out to the polls in the primary, it's a good bet that they'll do so in the general (something backed up by the significant new voter registration numbers that have started to come out across the country). If this gives his election-day numbers an unexpected bump, we could see something even more remarkable than anyone expects.