Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate. Both show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. One state changing status today, and once again it is a move in Romney’s direction:
Obama’s lead in the five poll average drops from 12.1% to 9.7%. So we no longer classify it as “Strong Obama”, but rather “Weak Obama”. Now, the average is still well over 5% (despite the most recent poll) so Oregon is still nowhere near being a swing state. In the last year there hasn’t been a single poll showing Romney leading in Oregon. But the lead is no longer so big that Obama would be safe completely ignoring the state. Romney could cause some heartburn for Obama there if he put some effort into the state. There have also only been five Oregon polls in the last year. If additional polling shows the current status is closer to the most recent poll than the previous four, and Romney continues to make gains, then Oregon may well move into swing state status later in the race. Since Oregon is neither entering or leaving swing state status, the summary stays the same:
Edit 2012 May 20 06:30 UTC – Fixed Map, SC was incorrectly colored as a swing state, it is now correctly colored as “Weak Romney”.
Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate. Both show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. One state changes status today, and it is a big one!
In my five poll average Florida moves from Obama up by 0.6% to Romney up by 0.2%. In either case, the bottom line is that Florida is too close to call and could go either way. The recent trend has been toward Romney though. We’ll see if Romney can pull Florida closer toward him, or if it remains a super close swing state. (Which is kind of what everyone expects.) Anyway, a big state flips to the Romney side. This effects the “current” line by moving 29 electoral votes in Romney’s direction, but the “best cases” representing the range of possible outcomes stay the same:
I had said I wouldn’t mention national level polls much, but there has been a big enough move there lately to warrant another mention. In the last couple of weeks there has been a substantial move toward Romney in the national polls, with the RCP Average dipping to an Obama lead of as low as 0.2% on May 8th, although it is back to 1.3% as of today. So why do the state numbers still show a massive Obama lead? There are two answers, one is of course that the election is based on the states, not the national popular vote, and they do not always move in lockstep. But frankly, they DO usually move together, and only tend to diverge much in really close situations. The electoral college just usually shows an “amplified” version of the separation between the candidates in the national popular vote. The more important factor right now is the second answer. State polls are still slow. There are new national polls every day. Meanwhile even important close states like Florida are still getting polled only once a week or so. Most states are polled even less frequently. This means that any state by state analysis will take longer to react to changes. If the race narrows significantly and stays narrowed, the state numbers will start showing that soon enough. (And state polling in close states will get increasingly frequent as we approach the election, so this lag will decrease dramatically later in the year.) Edit 2012 May 10 15:56 UTC – Moved summary box earlier in post.
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have clinched the nomination. If they get above 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. The first chart is by date, the second is by “% of Delegates Already Allocated”. These numbers include estimates of the eventual results of multi-stage caucus processes which will be refined as the later stages occur. Very minor update today. One West Virginia delegate that was thought to be a Romney delegate turns out to really still be TBD. This makes the total in West Virginia: Romney 23, Santorum 2, TBD 6. This in turn makes the overall total: Romney 956, Santorum 258, Gingrich 143, Paul 114, TBD 815 Romney’s “% of remaining needed to win” moves from 23.0% to 23.1%.
At first it was scary and there were tears, because he had never ridden front facing before. He had always riden rear facing. Then he realized how much he could see. Truck! Ambulance! Red Light! It was a thrilling ride to school facing forward! (Yeah, the picture is blurred because he was moving, but it was the one that best showed his joy after the trip. :-) )
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have clinched the nomination. If they get above 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. The first chart is by date, the second is by “% of Delegates Already Allocated”. These numbers include estimates of the eventual results of multi-stage caucus processes which will be refined as the later stages occur. Yawn! This is so past over it isn’t funny, but I’ll be doing these posts until Romney gets to 1144! Anyway, the new delegates awarded tonight are:
So that makes the total for today Romney 85, Santorum 8, Paul 6, Gingrich 4. Hmm. Wonder who won tonight? With 82.5% of the delegates, Romney did way better than the 29.7% of the delegates he needed to continue on pace for clinching the nomination. Meanwhile, Santorum finally reached the point where even if he got 100% of the remaining delegates he could not catch up and win. So now there is only one. But Romney still has to finish mopping up the delegates. He now only needs 23.0% of the delegates that are left in order to get to 1144. Next up is Oregon on the 15th. Then Kentucky and Arkansas on the 22nd. Then Texas on the 29th. Texas will probably be the state that puts Romney over the top unless he does much worse than expected between now and then. |
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