Watching the gyrations of this election has been diverting, but really, the road from here is not going to change no matter what happens this week in Minnesota. All right: maybe they’ll discover Sarah Palin is a Muslim, or find old tapes of her pastor denouncing America as the modern Sodom, or some other explosive revelation will knock her from the ticket and leave the GOP in awful disarray. Barring that, this race will come down to what it has been coming down to ever since it became a clear Obama/McCain contest: A handful of swing states will tip the election to one candidate or the other.
I’ve been hopeful for an Obama victory, and friends and relatives sometimes give me that fearful-Democrat look that has become prevalent over the past decade — that frown of “I’m worried, we screwed it up so many times in the past, the Republicans will find some way yet again to squeeze out a victory.” And sure, it could happen. But here’s why I think it won’t.
(1) Yes, it’s true that there will be more people voting against Obama because of his race than the polls are capturing. But the Obama campaign’s prodigious and effective get-out-the-vote effort, and its ability to pull in new voters among the young, will counterbalance the negative race vote, effectively canceling it out. So I’m not worried about it.
(2) The popular vote doesn’t matter. The electoral college chooses the president. So the map is really all that counts. And the map doesn’t look so bad. There are a number of combinations of states that get Obama over 270. For McCain to even have a shot, he’s got to win all of the big swing states (FL, OH, VA); then he also must either wrest something like PA or MI from the Obama column or, alternately, win in a whole bunch of smaller swing states like CO, NV, and NH. He could do it, but the stars will have to align just right for him. Obama can win without FL, OH or VA if he pulls it out in a few of those other states. He’s just got more roads to a win right now.
(3) What’s keeping me up at night is the possibility of an electoral college tie. You can see how easily this could happen from the recent electoral maps: If Obama holds all the Kerry states and in addition wins Iowa and Nevada and New Mexico but loses Colorado (or if he wins Iowa and Colorado but loses Nevada and NM) then he comes out with 269 electoral votes and so does McCain. Constitutional madness! The election goes to the House, but each state delegation casts one vote. Consensus seems to be that Obama has the edge in that scenario. But it’s a mess no matter how you play it out, and as we saw in 2000 the GOP is far more willing to play hardball in such circumstances. Still, any electoral-college tie is likely to involve Obama having the lead in the popular vote; the constitution doesn’t care about that — and it didn’t matter in 2000 — but it ought to put at least some weight in the scales with wavering congressional delegations.
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