newest electoral college predictions

here are my newest electoral college predictions:



red states will definitely be mccain states, dark blue states will definitely be obama states, yellow states will probably be mccain states, light blue states will probably be obama states, and white states are the real swing states that are pretty much 50/50 and could easily go either way.

methodology: i combined the latest data from cnn.com, electionprojection.com, electoral-vote.com, fivethirtyeight.com, intrade.net, pollster.com, and realclearpolitics.com. i started out with the realclearpolitics.com map, as is. then i went to cnn.com, and any state listed as “safe” for either candidate got marked that way on my map, and any state listed as “leaning” toward either candidate was marked as leaning towards them unless it was already a safe state, in which case it stayed safe. then i went to electionprojection.com, and any state listed as “solid” for a candidate got marked as a safe state for them, and any state listed as “strong” for them got marked as leaning towards them unless it was already marked as a safe state. then i went to pollster.com and repeated the same thing, marking anything it considered “strong” as a safe state for that candidate and anything it considered “lean” as leaning towards that candidate unless it was already marked as a safe state. then i did the same thing at electoral-vote.com again, and i ignored states that were “barely” for one candidate or the other. then i went to intrade.net, and anything with 90% or higher likelihood for a candidate was marked as safe for them, and 67% or higher likelihood was marked as leaning unless it was already marked as safe. lastly, i went to fivethirtyeight.com and did the exact same thing as at intrade.com with those same percentages.

the outcome of this process is as follows: if any state is considered a safe state for either candidate by any of the websites, i consider it a safe state too. if any state is considered as really leaning towards one candidate over the other by at least one website but not considered as a safe state by any website, i have it as leaning towards them. if any state is not safe or leaning towards either candidate in any of the websites at all, i have it as a real swing state, or as the pollsters call it, a “tossup” state. this methodical process eliminates any personal bias that i have from having any effect on the results.

and what are the results? obama has 273 electoral votes (197 from solid obama states and 76 from states leaning obama). mccain has 227 electoral votes (163 from solid mccain states and 64 from states leaning mccain). the other 38 electoral votes are from the 3 tossup states: nevada, ohio, and virginia. this all adds up to 538 electoral votes total. and what do i use for all these calculations? i use the interactive map at realclearpolitics.com. anyway, the ultimate result is pretty simple: obama wins and mccain loses.

now why on earth would that happen? simple, really. remember before the conventions and before anyone announced a running mate, earlier in august? back then, the polls had been pretty steady since late june with obama slightly ahead of mccain in the popular vote and consistently winning the electoral college. barack obama got a fairly big convention bounce, but his convention ended on a thursday evening and the friday morning immediately after, sarah palin was announced as john mccain’s vice president and suddenly she stole the spotlight from barack obama. starting that day, sarah palin and the republican convention gave john mccain a huge bounce in the polls, eventually putting him ahead in all the predictions for popular vote and electoral college. this bounce gradually grew until sometime earlier this month, i think last week actually. then the mccain-palin team hit a peak in the polls and started dropping, first slowly, but then accelerating quite fast over last weekend and this week, eventually putting barack obama ahead of john mccain in the polls in almost exactly the same numbers with almost exactly the same electoral map as in early august or even late june. now what are the reasons for the fluctuations in the last month? well, both obama and mccain had significant bounces, which were quite big for such a closely divided and partisan electorate, and mccain had a much bigger bounce than obama which also lasted a lot longer. but the mccain bounce was really a palin bounce. sarah palin became the big star and got all the media attention. at first she was a complete unknown outside of her home state of alaska, but within a week after being introduced to the nation by john mccain, she had a very high approval rating and very low disapproval rating, and had become the most popular and talked-about politician in the country, although hardly anyone knew much of anything about her. her name recognition continued to grow along with her approval rating, since although some scandals came out in the first week that were embarrassing for her, they all either backfired (like the one about bristol supposedly being trig’s mom) or didn’t have much effect at all (like troopergate). what everyone did know was that sarah palin loved guns and hunting, was a former beauty queen, was a christian fundamentalist, had been mayor of wasilla and was now governor of alaska, and seemed to be a charismatic woman that lots of people could relate to. all of this played very well to the republican base, which had been very lukewarm on john mccain, energizing them in support of the mccain-palin team. but it also helped unite democrats, as liberals who had supported hillary realized how right-wing sarah palin was and how sarah palin disagrees with hillary clinton on pretty much every issue. so both parties became more energized, united, and polarized. but sarah palin had a broad appeal at first, winning over many moderates and even many democrats, before the media had started to chip away at things. after the 2 conventions were over, john mccain and sarah palin were making all these joint campaign appearances, and kept repeating the same stump speeches. people in the media and independent fact-checking organizations found these speeches to have many lies in them, and started to report how the mccain-palin campaign kept repeating the same lies over and over. john mccain put some completely ridiculous ads full of bald-faced lies on tv, earning harsh rebukes from many media pundits and causing the media to become very distrustful of everything the mccain-palin campaign says. more and more negative information about sarah palin surfaced, driven by hordes of reporters sent up to investigate her in alaska, and huge numbers of liberal bloggers, some of whose blogs are actually read by people in the “mainstream media”. this negative information really started to damage sarah palin’s image, along with her refusal to talk to reporters, but the final nail in the coffin was when she finally did her first interview with a reporter after the convention, with charlie gibson of abc news. that interview turned out very, very badly for her, causing her public image to tumble even further, and now she has lower approval and higher disapproval than barack obama, john mccain, or joe biden. thus, democrats have successfully popped the sarah palin bubble, and she is no longer helping raise john mccain’s popularity, but actually having a detrimental effect on the popularity of john mccain, in the same way that the highly unpopular vice president dick cheney has had a negative effect on george w. bush’s popularity. then on sunday this week, an economic crisis hit, big time, and with every day, new revelations came out about companies in the financial or insurance sector either on the verge of collapse or in complete collapse. each company either got taken over by the government, got bought out by another company, or ended up going completely bankrupt. the stock market plunged for several days in a row. this bad economic news took both campaigns by surprise, but it turned out to help the obama-biden campaign a lot and hurt the mccain-palin campaign a lot, since john mccain kept contradicting himself and completely reversing his positions on things within less than a day or from one day to the next. also, john mccain and sarah palin tried some time campaigning separately, and it turned out john mccain cannot attract big crowds but sarah palin can, since she is much more interesting to most people. this also proved to be an embarrassment, and now john mccain and sarah palin are campaigning together again to prevent sarah palin from continuing to upstage john mccain and make him look like an out-of-it old man by comparison. another important factor was the opening of saturday night live on saturday last week, which really ridiculed sarah palin for things she had said in her interview with charlie gibson, helping turn the tide of public opinion against her with its satire. and in times of bad economic news, people naturally turn against whichever party controls the white house, especially if republicans are in charge, because the democrats have the legacy of pulling us out of the great depression in the 1930s, while the republicans put this country into the great depression with their reckless policies in the 1920s, a pattern that has repeated itself many times since then with recessions. anyhow, john mccain acted bizarre and completely out-of-touch all week, flip-flopping on everything regarding the current economic crisis, reversing himself on positions he had staunchly held throughout his entire political career, such as his decades-long support for deregulation and opposition to new regulation. he just seemed like he had absolutely no idea what was going on or what to do about it, so he kept making bold proclamations and then reversing himself less than a day later. barack obama, on the other hand, put out a very good 2-minute long commercial about how he would fix the economy, and he stayed on message and actually demonstrated leadership in a time of crisis. on thursday and friday this week, the stock market went way up, canceling out almost all the losses earlier this week, due to optimism about the measures the government has taken, is taking, and will probably take to deal with this economic crisis. and who are the people who managed to pull that off? the bush administration, oddly enough. federal reserve chairman ben bernanke is an expert on the great depression and is very bold in taking action to deal with economic problems proactively. treasury secretary henry paulson has not done quite as good a job at this, since he has been rather inconsistent in which companies he thinks need to be bailed out, which companies he does not want to bail out at all, and which ones he has trouble making up his mind on. he really dropped the ball when lehman brothers failed earlier this week. but since then, the government has taken some dramatic steps to impress wall street by showing the commitment our government has to stop this economic crisis in its tracks and fix everything. oddly enough, the solution the bush administration has chosen is socialism, having the government take over private companies and buy up all the bad debt, the subprime-mortgage-backed securities. after the free market approach failed to save lehman brothers, capitalism has been abandoned in favor of socialism. quite a strange development indeed. the bush administration has decided that fdr > hoover, something barack obama agrees with, and john mccain is out on his own, advocating the opposite of what the bush administration does, until after they do it later that day, and then the next day john mccain heartily endorses what they did. this whole economic affair has clearly benefited obama a great deal and hurt mccain just as much. what we do not know is how things will play out in the future. will the economy recover or get worse? how will what happens on wall street affect ordinary people? and how will the polls change? who will end up winning the election? nobody really knows for sure, and that is a fact. while obama is projected to win currently, the future is still uncertain, and almost anything could happen to change things. the main fight ahead for the candidates will probably be the 3 presidential debates and the 1 vice presidential debate. sarah palin and joe biden both help their parties’ tickets in some ways while hurting them in others, and both the democrats and republicans chose the strongest contenders from within their own ranks to fight it out in the general election. it is quite remarkable that john mccain even has a chance against barack obama in such a democratic-leaning year, with barack obama energizing so many new young voters. it really shows how the personal life story of john mccain and his “maverick” image have allowed him to pretend like he is not some typical republican, which means he can appeal to independents and even democrats in a year when democrats are heavily favored to win more seats in the house and senate and when republicans are incredibly unpopular and democrats have lots of new people registered in their party. it is amazing that john mccain is able to portray himself as an outsider when he has been an insider in a very exclusive club, the u.s. senate, for many, many years. this just shows how powerful the republican right-wing spin machine is, even during times when the political environment heavily favors the democrats. the people running john mccain’s campaign now are the same ones who ran george w. bush’s campaigns, and they know how to win, albeit narrowly, and in 2000 they actually lost the popular vote and had to go to the supreme court (where 7 out of 9 justices are republican appointees now, as it was then) to win the electoral college. my point is, the people running this thing on the other side know what they are doing, and we should not underestimate them, even if the odds are in our favor. we need to fight them as hard as we can, with everything we’ve got, or else they will win by forfeit, just like they did in 2000 and 2004. ultimately, passively observing this thing and using probability and statistics is no substitute for actively going out and doing something. this means, of course, i must find a way to go out and do something, despite the fact that i am basically broke when it comes to my personal finances, and i cannot take time off from working my evening job because i need the money. unfortunately, the hours i work are also the hours that most of the grassroots campaign activity takes place, so perhaps i can only help the democrats campaign on weekends. it is saturday now. i should start today. i wonder if i will. this afternoon there will be a fundraiser and i would have to pay $15 to get in. that is cheap and i can afford it. 5 pm at the binghamton regency hotel, $15 to get in since i am a member of the young dems, $30 for nonmembers. alright, i have rsvp’d to go on their website. i am going to go this afternoon, no matter what. no way in hell i am going to miss this event. also, earlier this afternoon, at 1 pm, i have the asperger syndrome support group meeting. i should probably go to that one too. damn... looks like i won’t get much sleep. i need to go to bed earlier from now on. good night.