Sunday, June 17, 2012

Romney 338, Obama 200?

Michael Barone foresees an easy victory for Mitt Romney.
It seems to be a standard rule in assessing the prospects of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in particular states to use the November 2008 numbers as a benchmark. However, as I have pointed out, in the last three presidential elections, the winning candidate has won a percentage of the popular vote identical to or within 1% of the percentage of the popular vote for the House of Representatives in the election held two years before. In this case, the November 2010 results are very different from 2008. In 2008 Obama won 53% of the popular vote. In 2010 House Democrats won 45% of the popular vote.

To gauge where the race is now in the various states I have prepared the following table. It lists the 16 states where Obama’s 2008 percentage was between 49% and 57%, ranked by Obama percentage. I have added Arizona, which the Obama campaign has reportedly been considering targeting; Obama got a higher percentage in Georgia and almost identical percentages to Arizona’s in South Carolina and South Dakota, but no one considers any of them to be in play.
For all of you pinkos who think that June's polls portend a narrow victory for Obama, recall that polls taken just days before the 1980 presidential election predicted a Jimmy Carter victory. Does anybody recall how Jimmy Carter's second term worked out?

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