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Townhall...
It Could Still Go Either Way
by Rich Galen
Oct 26, 2012 From Kiev, Ukarine
The
answer to the question is: I'm
here to be an official observer of the Ukrainian national elections on
Sunday
to select a new Parliament. I'll be back in the U.S. on Tuesday to
unofficially
observe our own elections.
Speaking
of our own elections ...
Romney's
bounce in the polls since
the first debate remains stubbornly in place. According to the Real
Clear
Politics average of national polls, Romney has a lead of two percentage
points
in those polls that have been taken this week.
Two
percentage points, as we have
been told over and over, is well with the margin of error (MoE) in
every single
poll. Still, as we have discussed before, given a choice you'd rather
be ahead
in a close race than behind.
Ok.
We know that our system is not
a direct vote for President. It is 51 separate elections - 50 states
and the
District of Columbia - in which 49 of those jurisdictions have a
winner-take-all policy: Who ever gets the most popular votes in every
state
except Maine and Nebraska, gets all the electoral votes.
As
long as we're doing Presidential
Elections 113, we might as well remind the new people in the class that
the
number of electoral votes each state gets is the total of the number of
Congressional Districts plus two because each state has two U.S.
Senators.
It
takes 270 electoral votes to win
an absolute majority so you might think that states with large numbers
of
electoral votes like California (55), New York (31), and Texas (38) for
a total
of 124 or about 46 percent of all the votes a candidates needs would be
in the
eye of the storm of electoral activity.
Nothing
could be further than the
truth.
In
fact other than for raising
money, neither candidate has done very much more than a drop by any of
those
three states. New York and California will go for Barack Obama. Texas
is firmly
in the Mitt Romney column.
If
both camps agree that a state is
"off-the-table" they turn their attention and resources to states
that are still in play - battleground states…
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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