Electoral Math I

Finally, an election that makes sense! Enough of this electing 75% of delegates to county, then state, then national conventions, and apportioning their allocation sometimes by popular vote, sometimes by popular vote in congressional districts, sometimes by caucus, and sometimes by all three, with the remaining 25% allowed to exercise their judgment outside of the normal one-person-one-vote strictures. God, that was confusing and open to interpretation. No, give me a straightforward, no-nonsense, small-state over-weighted apportionment of electors to an electoral college that picks the President. Simple, even.

So here’s what we’re gonna do. I’ve thrown together this spreadsheet, which is now a google spreadsheet, and you can go download it and play around with it. It’s a list of states, with their number of electoral votes, and you can move them around between the two candidates to see what happens to the total – ie, who gets crowned president. Make sure to check out the various tabs, which represent different scenarios. But first I’ll tell you what I’ve found, so you’ll have something to refute.

As you can see if you go to the spreadsheet, I’ve divided things up into two groups – states that are in play, and states that aren’t. That’s not to say that Obama couldn’t win Alabama, it just means that this exercise is pointless if Obama wins Alabama, because he’d also win almost everything else.

Let’s start with your garden-variety Bush-Kerry redux - give Obama New Mexico and Iowa, but keep everything else the same. Obama’s supposed rust belt problem keeps him from taking Ohio, but doesn’t hurt him enough to lose Pennsylvania, and his potential strength in the interior west and/or south never really materializes. This is, in some ways, the most conservative map we could imagine. McCain wins it by a slim margin – just one Colorado, Missouri, or Virginia would be enough to change the result. But those are tough gets in a tight race.

Now let’s shake things up. What if those same rust belt problems cost Obama either Michigan or Pennsylvania, which have 17 and 21 votes respectively? In that case, he needs to show some real strength in the west and the plains. He wouldn’t necessarily need all of Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia, but he’s need four of them. And not the four that doesn’t include Virginia – the largest of the group at 13. And if he loses BOTH MI and PA? Well, then he’d have to make like Columbus and capture North Carolina or Georgia, as well as all the above. New map shnew map, I don’t want to count on Georgia. Georgia? You think Ty Cobb, godresthissoul, would vote for Obama?

Al Gore and John Kerry made the Mason-Dixon line look like the DMZ, and since Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada all together have fewer votes than any one of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, everything other than those three was more or less molding – win two out of those three, and you had the White House. Obama may struggle in Democratic strongholds, however, and threaten hostile territory elsewhere, making the map much more fluid than in the past. I’d love to see some Pickle readers playing around with the numbers and sharing their take…