On Wednesday of this week FiveThirtyEight had Obama losing a majority of their simulations for the first time ever; panic swept the land. Normally this is where I’d insert the standard caveat that polls don’t mean anything this far from the election. Though I suppose if you’re being honest with yourself you cannot take cheer from the polls when Obama’s up without taking some gloom from them when he’s down. Nevertheless, I remain confident that the skinny kid with the funny name is going to prevail.
It’s possible I’m being unduly optimistic. I may find the idea of John McCain winning the election, with the catastrophic and unpopular Bush Administration as his guiding light, so incongruous that it’s destroyed my ability to reason. I don’t think that’s the case, but it is possible. While it’s easy to reassure myself by reciting the usual liturgy of reasons why McCain is doomed instead I’m going to ask two simple questions, the answers to which give me my confidence.
Question the first: “Is there any chance that John McCain can win a state George Bush lost to John Kerry?”
Answer the first: Qualified No.
Question the second: “John Kerry fell 18 electoral votes short, is Barack Obama in good shape to pick up that many or more?”
Answer the second: Qualified Yes.
To justify those answers, let’s look at three separate maps. The first two, in the image below, are pulled from Wikipedia. The top is the electoral map from 2000, the bottom is 2004.
Red versus Blue
The maps are roughly similar (the slightly different numbers are the result of reapportionment after the 2000 census); only three states changed color from 2000 to 2004: New Hampshire went Red-to-Blue, Iowa and New Mexico went Blue-to-Red. (There is a very strong circumstantial case that Al Gore won Florida in 2000 and as Bush indisputably won it in 2004 that would bring the number of Blue-to-Red states to three.) The 2004 map, the one on which we’re basing our two simple questions, is easy to describe: a contiguous sea of Red with three Blue islands, the Left Coast (Washington, Oregon, and California), the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan), and the Northeast, from DC to Maine.
John Kerry won 252 electoral votes with those islands, he needed 270. Of the Blue states, Wisconsin was the narrowest win, Kerry squeaked by with a margin of 0.38% and a difference of 11,000 votes. McCain is currently behind by 10 points there and doesn’t seem to be seriously contesting it. So . . . how many Kerry states are currently competitive?
New Hampshire. That’s it. Every other state voted against Bush the Younger twice and not surprisingly they aren’t very hospitable to McCain. The Granite State (and its whopping 4 electoral votes) is the only Kerry state that is really in play, and it’s leaning toward Obama. Pollster, ElectionProjection, FiveThirtyEight, pick your polling aggregation website and you’re going to see all of Kerry’s states lining up behind Obama.
That’s the answer to question the first: McCain probably isn’t going to turn any Blue-to-Red with the possible exception of tiny New Hampshire (and even there he’s behind.) Which brings us to the second question, how does Obama get over the top to 270?
To answer that we’re going to need a second image and a third map. There are two maps in the image below, the upper map is the same 2004 map from above; the lower map is the current Pollster.com projections for this year. (I’m using the Pollster.com map because it’s more amenable to my limited image cropping and scaling skills than the one at FiveThirtyEight.com. The content of the two maps are very similar.)
Red goes Yellow, Blue stays Blue
The first thing you’ll notice is that Iowa and New Mexico - the 2004 defectors - have moved back to Blue. They have twelve electoral votes combined, two thirds of what Obama needs to add to Kerry’s total. If Obama picks up both Iowa and New Mexico, and according to Pollster’s numbers he’s ahead by 6.5% and 7.8% respectively, he’s within six electors of the White House with New Hampshire and ten without New Hampshire.
To get to 1600 Pennsylvania he’ll need to win one or more of the yellow states; they are listed as “Toss Up” on Pollster and there are ten of them at the moment. Nine of those ten went Red in 2004 (again, New Hampshire is the exception.) Of those nine, Obama is leading in six. Here are the details (in order of Obama’s current lead or lack thereof):
| Montana | +3.1 |
| Alaska | +2.7 |
| Ohio | +2.2 |
| Virginia | +1.2 |
| Colorado | +1.1 |
| Nevada | +0.6 |
| Florida | -1.3 |
| North Dakota | -2.4 |
| North Carolina | -3.0 |
The other poll aggregation sites disagree on which ones lean which way, but all are roughly in play. Of that list, Ohio and Virginia are large enough to deliver Obama with or without New Hampshire. Colorado, where Obama’s packing the House that Elway Built this week, is big enough to deliver him with New Hampshire but not without. Obama is ahead in all four.
Awarding Obama the Kerry states is an assumption, awarding him Iowa and New Mexico is an assumption, awarding him New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia or Colorado are assumptions. But they’re reasonable assumptions based on relatively good data and the bottom line numbers are grim for McCain. They aren’t as grim as Hillary Clinton’s post March 5th numbers, those at least were based on real votes not ephemeral polling data, but they cannot in any honest way be called good.
Blue America, the eighteen states (plus D.C.) that voted against the generic Republican campaign of 2000 (compassionate conservatism, tax cuts for the surplus, blah blah blah) and against the modern Republican campaign of 2004 (vote for Bush or terrorists will eat your baby!), are not going Red in 2008. Combined they account for 248 electoral votes. That is Obama’s base and it is quite secure. He needs twenty-two more votes from there.
Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, New Hampshire, those are the battleground states this year. McCain needs to hold an awful lot of them and he’s got to do it with less money (once the public financing constraints kick in) and less organization in a bad economy with a hugely unpopular incumbent looming over his shoulder. It’s not that he can’t do it; it’s just that the road he has to travel has an awful lot of obstacles.
National poll numbers are easy to fit into a headline or a sound bite and popular vote victories are nice, but both of them are worth squat in the real world. Electoral math is the path to power and John McCain has been woefully behind on that scoreboard all summer. Obama’s recent dip in the polls has been good for political commentary and speculation, but that’s about the extent of its effects. Unless McCain comes out of the Red convention with significantly better numbers than he’s got right now he’ll need an October Miracle - not a mere Surprise - to get to 270 electors and 1600 Pennsylvania.
