By the time this appears in print the outcome of the 2012 Presidential race will be history. That is, at least, my fervent prayer as I write this in the wee hours of Election Eve. In that appeal to a higher power, I believe that I am joined by each and every one of my fellow Americans — at the very least, those who are not paid political consultants or news/talk hosts on the nation’s more prominent radio and/or television networks. It’s been a rough one for months now, the end of which is bound to seem more relief than reward even by the man who wins it in the end.
That man will be Barack Obama. Obama led Mitt Romney in Weld’s projected Electoral College vote totals every week from the inception of this feature in September. During that time, the President’s weekly vote totals ranged from a high of 347 just prior to the October 3 debate in Denver, to 290 in a special online update we posted last Thursday, November 1.
The narrative emanating from the Romney camp was that the former Massachusetts governor had established unstoppable momentum in the month leading up to the election, and that polls suggesting otherwise — broadly speaking, 90 percent or better of all polls conducted — were biased in favor of Obama. This, so the narrative went, was going to translate into an enthusiastically huge turnout of Republicans on Election Day, not unlike the juggernaut that put Obama into office four years ago in such a cakewalk over John McCain. Terms like “Mittmentum” emanated from straight faces, as did talk of a Romney landslide.
By the time this appears in print, we will know it never happened. What did happen, over the weekend and right up through late Monday night, was that Obama salted away leads in several key states. Even more simply, what happened was that Obama sewed up Ohio and made it impossible for Romney to win absent some kind of minor miracle — like, say, carrying Pennsylvania, which just wasn’t going to happen.
(I‘ll go ahead and insert the disclaimer here. If you’re reading this and Romney has won, then feel free to consider this entire column my version of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” presser, sans aircraft carrier. My avid belief in math and science led me astray, and I’m going to say something now that W. will never have the grace to say: I was wrong.)
But math and science are what this Electoral College Scoreboard has been all about. The objective is not necessarily to predict a winner, but rather to calculate the likelihood that one candidate or the other will win the electoral votes of a given state. Having said that, if one chooses to take that projection and use it as the basis of a prediction, it’s probably as good a yardstick for that purpose as any.
With that in mind, I do believe that Obama will win the election, because my analysis says he will win a minimum of 284 electoral votes — 14 more than he needs — and a maximum of 347. Romney highest possible total is 254, or he could get as few as 191.
Why is Romney shut out of an Electoral College win? Go back to something I wrote several weeks ago, before the Denver debate and the Romney Surge (the real one that ended two weeks before the election, not the one the Republicans have talked about while valiantly trying to manufacture since):
[Romney is] running out of places to get the votes he needs to have even a chance of winning, I concluded on September 20. Also: He has to win currently undecided voters in all key states by margins that can only be described as ungodly.]
So what happened? Romney ran out of places to win. The surge got him North Carolina, which went to Obama four years ago. It put him back in the lead in Florida heading into Election Day, but his margin there as I finished this column was down to almost half-a-point. It made Virginia competitive on Election Day as well — we actually put Romney in the lead there as recently as last Friday — but the trend swung heavily back toward Obama over the weekend, propelling him to a 1.2 point lead.
But — and I can’t stress this enough — Obama won Ohio over the campaign’s last week. He won New Hampshire and most likely Iowa. Last-minute trends favored him in Colorado, Florida and Virginia, as well as in other states where Romney had once harbored hope, like Nevada and Wisconsin. He was closing the gap in North Carolina, though almost certainly not enough to win it.
What was the Romney campaign doing while Obama was sealing several deals? Putting their eggs in the unsteady basket of Pennsylvania, in this not unlike Robert E. Lee leading his Army of Northern Virginia on a make-or-break invasion of Union Territory in the summer of 1863. It was an elaborate Rovian body-fake thrown in desperation of finding something to shake up a race in which Romney’s post-debate momentum had stalled. No doubt that, like Lee, they hoped for victory against the odds and a game-changer in Pennsylvania, but got much the same result; there was a moment when it might have happened, but the moment passed unmet.
So what’s the final projection? I made it 290-206 Obama, not counting Florida and Virginia, which were too close to do anything other than guess. Sticking to our time-honored formula of awarding Tossup states according to who’s ahead, no matter the margin, Romney got Florida and Virginia went to Obama.
Final Electoral College Projection: Obama 303, Romney 235