In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam talks about:
Just click to listen now: [wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/cc20120410.mp3″ text=”Recorded 10 Apr 2012″] or
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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. Both show the polling situation as it currently exists. Things can and 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. Just yesterday I was mentioning that at some point things have to stop getting worse for Romney. Yesterday was not that day. Neither is today. Today my poll average for Colorado sees Obama’s lead increase to over 5%. So I color the state light blue and take it out of swing state status. So, if we give Romney every single one of the remaining swing states… we end up with a 269 to 269 electoral vote tie. In all fairness, ties go to the House and almost certainly that would lead to a Romney win. So Romney can still pull out that very messy win. But this means that with current polling Romney would not be able to manage a direct win in the electoral college, even in the most favorable disposition of the swing states. That is a remarkably bad position to be in, even this early. The overall summary looks like this:
Given that, lets compare to four years ago… On April 11th 2008 if each candidate won every state where they were ahead, McCain would have beaten Obama 283 to 255. He would have won by 28 electoral votes. That is a tight victory in electoral college terms but it is a victory. Meanwhile, today, if each candidate won every states where they are ahead, Obama would beat Romney 328 to 210. That is a 118 electoral vote margin. Romney is in a much worse position now than McCain was in four years ago. Of course McCain ended up losing by a pretty substantial margin. So should we all just go home? Obama is going to win, so why bother even having a campaign? No. Not hardly. If we were seeing these numbers in October… then maybe, like I did on October 3rd 2008 when McCain’s best case got this bad, I’d say exactly that. But it is not October. It is April. Despite McCain’s small lead at this time four years ago the actual election ended up being Obama 365 McCain 173… a 192 electoral vote margin for Obama. So big swings can happen. In 2008 between April 11th and election day 110 electoral votes moved in Obama’s direction. If Romney’s campaign manages to move a similar 110 electoral votes his way… he would win easily. So even though Obama is way ahead based on today’s polling, the battle has just barely begun. There is a lot more to come. As our recently departed Senator Santorum would say, “Game On!” @BreakingNews says Santorum has decided to drop out! It will be interesting to see if he hangs on to his delegates or releases them (those that ate bound anyway, many are not officially bound) and where those delegates end up. In the end though, this just ratifies the already known result. It is Romney. It has always been Romney. Update 18:31 UTC: Suspending his campaign, not dropping out. This is the usual course for candidates at this stage. Means they keep their bound delegates (although unbound can of course change their minds and vote for whoever they want) and are able to keep fundraising and such to pay off debts, etc.
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. 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 has than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. At some point things have to stop getting worse for Romney, right? As he pivots from the primaries to the general election, he’ll start pulling back support from the middle and start gaining ground again, right? Well, probably. But not yet. In today’s update the 5 poll average for Michigan moves to Obama having more than a 10% lead in that state. So we color the state dark blue. Essentially this means it is a state Romney probably shouldn’t bother putting any resources into at all. The situation may change later, but for the moment, it is out of reach. Since Michigan isn’t moving in or out of Swing State status, the overall summary remains the same with Obama clearly the favorite by a large margin, but Romney still being able to squeak by with a win if he manages to sweep all of the too close to call swing states:
One thing to keep in mind at this stage is that state polling is still sparse. So the “five poll averages” I use for this analysis can cover a lot of time. For instance, in Michigan my five poll average currently has polls that were done all the way back through January. (Specifically it includes one from January, two from February, one from March and one from April.) There are still just a handful of state polls per week. Some states actually haven’t even been polled at all and I’m extrapolating based on the 2004 and 2008 elections. I’m also doing a straight average, not a recency weighted average. Because of this, this analysis will react more slowly to changes in the political situation. At least that is the situation here in April. As we get closer and closer to November, we’ll have a faster and faster pace of polls. By the time we get to October we will have many new state polls every week, and changes in this analysis will be much more frequent and catch changes faster. Edit 2012 May 30 15:49 UTC: It turns out that between the last update on Mar 30 and this one New Hampshire should have moved from Weak Romney to Lean Romney on Mar 31. At that time however, I was missing some polls and thought New Hampshire was already Lean Romney, so no update was posted. This is corrected in the historical charts starting on May 30.
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 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. You’d think the remaining superdelegates would be rushing in a mob to get on the Romney bandwagon at this point, but not so far. We have an additional super from Massachusetts today. Well, actually DCW identified the new super on Saturday, but it took Green Papers a few days to update their Massachusetts numbers. Since we go by Green Papers here, we waited. :-) In any case, this is only one delegate, so only very minor changes to the “% of remaining needed to win” numbers:
And now we continue to yawn and wait in the lull before the next actual contests. Not that there is much contest left anyway, but Romney still does need to mop up the rest of the 1144 delegates he needs.
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 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. So… remember yesterday when I removed three delegates from Romney’s column because Green Papers decided the three super delegates in Wisconsin were not bound by the primary results? Well, in today’s update they put them back. They are now officially “uncommitted” in their hard count, but are Romney in the soft count (which we use for these charts). The soft count indicates not just the official status, but other indicators of the ways the delegates are likely to vote. In any case, this reverts things to how they were a couple days ago on our charts. I’m sure Romney will breathe a lot easier with these three delegates back in his column. :-)
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 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. So, Green Papers updated their Wisconsin numbers. They had been 33 Romney, 9 Santorum. They are now 30 Romney, 9 Santorum, 3 still available. Green Papers’ latest update commentary indicates that they had previously thought these superdelegates were bound by the primary results, but it turns out they are not. DCW still says however that those superdelegates are bound by the election results and don’t have independent free choice here, in which case they probably really should be in the Romney column. In fact DCW only made that change on the 4th. So I’m not really sure who is right here. For purposes of our counts, we go with Green Papers though, so Romney loses the three delegates from his count. If information is found that these superdelegates are bound after all, Green Papers will update accordingly. The changes to the “% of remaining delegates needed to win” number:
So bad for Romney (since he loses 3 delegates for now) and good for everybody else since these delegates are theoretically now up for grabs again. But really, this changes nothing. Romney is the nominee. Edit 2012 Apr 6 07:07 UTC to refer to both GP and DCW’s views on the 3 superdelegates being bound after I found GP’s comments on this.
We’d last talked about this after Louisiana. But at that point in terms of % of delegates allocated the 2012 progress in the race still hadn’t gotten to where we were in 2008 immediately after Super Tuesday. We were in the 2008 “gap” caused by the large number of delegates allocated on Super Tuesday in 2008. At this point in the race, on April 4th, we are STILL not quite past where we were once all the 2008 Super Tuesday delegates were counted. But we are close… And once again, we see that, yes, Romney is behind where McCain was at the corresponding place in the delegate hunt. But it is very close. It is not a big substantial difference. Right now we have 50.4% of the delegates allocated and Romney has 29.0% of them. On the day in 2008 we finally had all the results from Super Tuesday (February 9th) we had 52.1% and McCain had 30.0% of the delegates. So Romney is 1.0% or so behind McCain’s pace from 4 years ago once you are looking at an even scale based on % of delegates determined so far. These lines fairly neatly track each other. There is NOT a substantial gap where Romney was underperforming McCain. The perception certainly has been that there was. Romney having problems wrapping it up and such. But this is 100% due to the stretched out calendar. It is not due to winner take all vs proportional. It is just about the calendar. The fact that here on April 4th, we STILL haven’t allocated as many delegates as were allocated on February 9th back in 2008 is extraordinary. This is why it SEEMS like it has taken a lot longer to wrap things up… because it has! But in terms of the calendar only. The Republicans stretched out the whole race by spreading the contests out, so of course it takes more calendar time for the winner to consolidate their win. Duh. But this doesn’t support the conclusion that Romney was somehow less able to consolidate Republican support than McCain was. They really have moved through the process at a remarkably similar rate. It just doesn’t seem like it because the process is so stretched out this time.
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 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. So… this is it. Long ago any realistic possibility for any non-Romney to win the nomination disappeared. With today’s update the already long odds for the non-Romneys to keep Romney from getting to 1144 essentially drop to zero. This is over. Romney wins. Without any sort of brokered convention. For something else to happen now we’d need some event that was so earth shaking that Romney dropped out. This is extremely unlikely. Details below. We have updates from four contests. In alphabetical order:
Add those up and we have a net total for today of Romney +99, Santorum +4, Gingrich -2, Paul -6 Obviously Romney completely dominated the day. In terms of “% of remaining delegates needed to win” we have this:
The also-rans who left the race early on… Bachman, Huntsman and Perry… are mathematically eliminated after today. Paul, Gingrich and Santorum will inevitably join them soon. The blocking Romney option? At this point the non-Romneys collectively would need to get 57.5% of the remaining delegates. So far they have managed 42.6% of the delegates. A change of this sort, while not mathematically impossible, would be unprecedented, especially since we are in the phase of the campaign where it is clear Romney is winning and the others are losing. People just stop voting for losers. As things go on, the % of delegates the non-Romneys get will probably actually decline. A major increase is just not going to happen. It is over. (We will of course continue to update these charts until Romney actually gets to 1144 however.) Sometime a few weeks ago I looked at the upcoming states and misread something and got it stuck in my head that DC, MD and WI were all winner take all states. I then repeated that a number of times on this blog and in my podcast. BUZZZ!! DC is indeed winner take all, but MD and WI are only “Winner take all by State and Congressional District”. So some delegates are chosen winner take all by the state results, and then additional delegates are allocated for the winners of each congressional district. So not really WTA. Oops. Sorry about that. In any case, when I post delegate updates they will of course reflect the actual delegate distributions, not my imaginary winner take all results. This does mean that today will probably not be quite as much of a knockout punch for Romney as I expected, but it is looking to still be a pretty decisive victory, certainly more than he needs to be on pace for 1144. |
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