Electoral College: Virginia Goes Blue

Map and chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no third party strong enough to win states. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate has than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.

Surely we must be close to Romney’s nadir, right? We expect him to suffer in the polls while going through his primary battle, but once it becomes clear he is the nominee and he can start pivoting to the general election, he should start fighting back. Right? That’s what we expect? Romney should hope that this is his low point, because his best case is now just barely squeaking out a win…

The new update today to my “last five poll average” for Virginia pushes Obama’s lead to over 5%. So I move the state out of the swing state category and into “Weak Obama” which I color light blue above.

This change makes our summary look like this:

This means that in Romney’s best case (that is, he wins every single swing state), he wins with only 9 more electoral votes than the 269 needed to tie. That is getting awfully close.

That would mean that out of the nine swing states (defined as states where the leading candidate is ahead by less than 5% in the polls)…

• Romney MUST win Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15), Tennessee (11) and Missouri (10) to win.
• He could afford to lose ONE of Iowa (6), Nevada (6) or New Hampshire (4) and still win.
• If he won all the rest, but lost Colorado (9) then we’d end up with a 269 to 269 tie, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives (voting by state delegation) which would likely result in a Romney win as well.

(Meanwhile, in Obama’s best case, he wins with 99 more electoral votes than needed to tie.)

That is of course if the election was today, which it is not. We have a long way to go. These lines will move up and down quite a bit before we get to November.