Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Update: They're all must-win states for McCain
I realized a big flaw in my earlier post about FL being a must win state for McCain. It's still correct, but I was painting the picture much too brightly for McCain. In the comments to that post, Bio-Nelly pointed out that Ohio is also a must-win state, which is also true, but still not enough. In order to even tie, McCain must take all the states that 270towin.com currently allocates to him, plus FL, NC, VA, OH, IN, MO, NV and NH. Given the way the polls have been moving, that seems pretty unlikely. But even winning all those states only gets McCain to a tie, which likely means a win for Obama. In order to actually win, McCain must take all those states, plus at least one of the remaining five: PA, MI, MN, WI, and CO. and in spite of all the talk of these states as swing states, they are all very much in Obama's favor right now. Of these, McCain's best shot of a pickup is in CO, where fivethirtyeight.com currently gives him a 16% chance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
It is still too early! A series of sharp rises in the stock market, an acceptable performance by Palin in the debate, or a strong performance by McCain, etc., could drive the numbers the other way. These undecided or recently decided voters in the swing states could waffle. Their current choices might be determined by their feelings about a candidate at the moment. I don't think they are comparing candidates policies.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not declaring victory yet, but McCain has a VERY steep hill to climb if he wants to be President. In order to win, he absolutely must win one of these states: PA, MN, MI, WI, or CO, plus every other swing state. If you look at the polling data for those five states, you begin to see why I don't think it's likely. Because of his deeper core strength, Obama starts with a 39 EV lead, so he has a lot more ways that he can win. For example Obama can afford to lose CO, so long as he picks up VA instead. McCain doesn't have that luxury. He really has to win every single state where he's even coming close to Obama, and then oe more. With Obama polling at +8 today in both Florida and Ohio (to name just two examples), such a come back is becoming increasingly unlikely.
Please don't take this as an excuse for anyone to rest on their laurels. It is vitally important that Obama not only win this election but win it by a big margin. There are at least three reasons:
1. A mandate. We need to be able to say without question, we one, and our agenda will be done. That won't stop the Republicans from filibustering, but it will make it harder for them.
2. Down ticket races. What would stop the Republicans from filibustering is a 60-seat majority in the Senate. fivethirtyeight.com places the odds of that happening at 16% today, so it's a very real possibility, and perceived inevitability will hurt the odds.
3. Most importantly, election fraud. The last two elections have been stolen from us. It's easy to steal a close election, but almost impossible to steal one with a big margin.
While I'm quite optimistic about Obama's chances, it's important not to get TOO confident. Even with his performance in the polls, it is still vital that everyone vote and that everyone work on GOTV.
Democrats are picking up IA since McCain keeps slamming corn ethanol and promoting drilling and whaling instead. He also rarely goes there and Obama is often there.
But there are still plenty of ways to construct a nightmare scenario.
If McCain held on to NV, NM, CO, FL, MO, VA, NC, IN, and NH, he'd be at 263. Add Ohio and he's at 283 and could afford to lose NM or CO or MO or IN. That's not unthinkable with another 8-point swing in the polls or the polls just being off this year. (They are likely to be off in the other direction, but still.)
The worst nightmare is that he wins PA and/or MI or another state expected to go blue like MN or OR or WA. Say McCain miraculously got PA OH MI IN. Obama would need to hold FL VA CO NM to get a victory. I want to believe in the probabilities, but it still looks very dangerous to me. At least it is a pacman-shaped probability pie now with Obama the pacman and McCain the ghost…
Hi there. I found your site through electoral-vote.com. Excellent blog. I am a big fan of data visualization (Edward Tufte, et al), and I love the way you represent the vote breakdown, and visit your site almost every day.
It's not clear to me that the small leads Obama has in crucial states will hold. Voters always make idle threats about change (and try not to appear racist) when talking to the pollsters, but tend to be more conservative in the voting booth. However, I don't get the impression that you think Obama could possibly lose from your posts, even when you argue against getting "too confident".
Andrew Tanenbaum strikes a great balance in his daily posts on electoral-vote. Clearly he is an Obama supporter, but his biases are not immediately obvious from how he writes. I bet you could increase your readership by striking a more objective and neutral tone... just my unsolicited opinion. :)
Well, first... I'm not Andy Tananenbaum. He's a whole lot smarter than me, and maybe a whole lot less biased.
But while a few of my posts are biased, this one was straight analysis. There is nothing in there saying "Yay! Obama's going to win", I just laid out the situation as it stands today.
It is absolutely possible that McCain can come back to win. But as I said yesterday, he has a very steep hill to climb for that to happen. You're right, many of Obama's leads are small... but the size of the leads isn't what makes them formidable, it's the shear number of them. Let me put it this way: In order to win the presidency today, John McCain would need to win some combination of 107 of the 115 EVs available from the the Barely McCain, Tied, or any of Obama's states. On the other hand, Obama needs just 10 EVs out of the same range. Of course, that 5% line isn't anything magical, so some of the states above the line could switch as well, but regardless of how he does it, McCain has to move a whole lot more votes in a pretty short period of time if he want's to win, and that was all that I was saying in my post. It isn't being partisan to point out that that is a difficult challenge for McCain to solve, and if the tables were reversed, I would point out the same thing.
By my calculation, McCain would need to win all of the states Electoral-Vote.com currently has going for him, plus NC (which is tied right now), plus all of the "Barely Obama" states except for Nevada OR New Hampshire. If he loses both of those, or any of the other states that are still in the Barely or Tied categories, then it's either a win for Obama or a tie.
Of course, like M. Swanson said,it is still possible for things to change. However, as can clearly be seen in your charts (which I love, by the way), Obama has much more strong support than McCain. I tend to look just at the strong and weak states when I'm considering the candidates' positions, and consider the barely states as "May as well be tied" (though I have to admit, I was very happy when my home state switched from barely red to barely blue). When you look at it that way, McCain is about 100 EVs behind Obama. Obama may not have quite enough to win, but he's still in a much better position than McCain, and I frankly have a hard time believing that even a month is going to be enough time for McCain to make up that much ground.
Post a Comment