|
|
Saturday, July 24, 2004
|
|
DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
Ohio. Pennsylvania. Missouri. Florida. West Virginia. New Mexico. Arizona. Michigan. New Hampshire. Oregon. Washington. Wisconsin. Minnesota. Colorado
If you don't live in one of those 14 states, you needn't worry your pretty little heads about voting this year. Your vote really doesn't matter. The election has pretty much already been decided for you and you won't see the candidates in your state. Well, that's not entirely true. You might see Nader.
The next President of the United States will be decided in the states that I've listed. Under ordinary circumstances, time and money would still be spent in the rest of the country, but given how close the polling is, and the intense desire by everyone to avoid a replay of 2000. Everything is going to happen in those states. No one in their right mind will spend resources in a state where the winner is preordained when they can be better utilized in a tight state.
Most people believe that Florida was closet state in 2000. It wasn't. New Mexico was. All of the states that I've listed above were decided by less than five percent of the vote. There was a difference of 366 votes between Al Gore and George Bush there. On the other hand, California had a spread of nearly 13%. New York went for Gore by a full 25%. Texas went to Bush with 22%. The tallies for New York, California and Texas aren't likely to change in any significant way this year. But if New Mexico shifts by less than 1%, it could tip the electoral college and determine a winner. If it were your choice to make, where would you spend the time and money?
Close elections are unpredictable. Florida only mattered so much last time because Gore couldn't do anything crazy, like win his home state of Tennessee, which Bush carried with 4%. Gore pulled all of his advertising from Ohio in the last week of the campaign, and Bush carried it with slight more than 3% of the vote. Gore lost in the electoral college by one vote. Had he have won his own home state -which a presidential candidate is sort of expected to do (The last candidate to lose his home state was Alf Landon in 1936) - its 11 votes would have given Gore a comfortable margin of 280 Electoral votes. Had Gore not abandoned Ohio, which a Republican has never gone to the White House without, he had a decent shot at its 21 electoral votes and would have won by a blowout in the electoral college.
Florida only mattered because of the stupid strategic mistakes Gore made in the final weeks of the campaign. George Bush did not steal the presidency. Al Gore gave it away.
I'm pretty good at calling elections. In 2000, I actually predicted Gore would win a year before election day. The closer the election came, the more convinced I was that it was Gore's race to lose. My predictions were, overall, pretty accurate. I called 47 of the 50 states accurately. Here are the ones I got wrong,
-Missouri: 11 electoral votes.
-West Virginia: 5 electoral votes.
-Florida: 25 electoral votes (this year they have 27.)
Had Gore won those three states, as I predicted he would, he would have ammassed a total of 310 of the 538 electoral votes. Close but still a win, particularly when you consider that Kennedy in 1960 (303), Nixon in '68 (301), and Carter in '76 (297) all won the White House with fewer electoral votes than Gore would have. But Gore ended up spending too much time in states that were safe for him, like California and not enough in states he needed desperately, like the three I called wrong.
Unless John Kerry's people are a whole lot dumber than I think they are, they can do the same math I just did. They know what they need. So does the president. And this is the beauty of the electoral college. It forces candidates to go to states where no one lives. If the president were decided by a straight popular vote, people like Judy (formerly of California, currently in New Jersey), Zombie and 0phelia (both of Michigan) and Mary Magdalicious (Illinois) would be seeing a lot of their presidential candidates. under the electoral college, Judy and Mary won't get within 500 miles of them and Zombie and 0phelia will see their motorcades from time to time, but Ford W. Maverick (West Virginia) faces the ugly possiblity of seeing George Bush and John Kerry engage in a fist fight in his front yard over who gets to sleep in the bottom of his bunk bed on a given night.
Editor's Note: For those of you who doubt my numbers or calculations, the resources I used can be found here, here and here.
UPDATE: MONDAY JULY 26 There's an interesting tally of the race for electoral votes here. Below is the AP's view of who is carrying what. My comments follow.
TOSSUPS - Bush and Kerry are running even in 11 states with a combined 128 electoral votes. Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan and West Virginia are the toughest battlegrounds. Two other tossups, Pennsylvania and Oregon, could soon move to Kerry's column.
LEAN KERRY - Maine, Minnesota and Washington (a combined 25 electoral votes) favor Kerry over Bush by a few percentage points. Gore carried them in 2000.
LEAN BUSH - North Carolina, Colorado, Louisiana, Arizona, Virginia, Arkansas and Missouri (a combined 73 electoral votes) give Bush modest leads. He won all seven in 2000. Actually, if I were on Team Bush, I'd be very, very concerned about the "Lean Bush" states. If he loses any of those states, he's doomed. Of those seven states, the only one that was anywhere close in 2000 was Arizona. The rest were carried with high single digit, or low double digit leads. He fails in any of those seven, it's going to be a very early night.
|
|
|
| |
