How to make an elephant float

Since everyone else has decided to tell you either about Colin Powell, Joe the Plumber (who made a really great point in a really ironic setting towards the end of the article), or Sarah Palin on SNL, I am going to go ahead and take a look at the electoral map again. You may ask why, since I looked at it already today, and the day before, and even the day before that. You may ask why, since the guys over at fivethirtyeight took care of this for me already. Well, I want to take a slightly different perspective on the map today. One that will let me know how late I can expect to stay up on Election Night. That's a misnomer, I mean to say one that will let me know how early I can expect to start drinking and under what circumstances. The perspective I have in mind is this: what does an electoral win for McCain look like with Virginia off the table?

Right now, this is the electoral map I'm sitting with over at 270towin.com:

















The actual numbers may be a bit hard to see as it turns out (large apparently does not mean full size in Blogger's composer wonderland of making this post take longer on the technical side than the writing). This projection gives the win to Obama at 364 electoral votes with 270 needed to win. McCain has been starting to sound somewhat defeated lately, and here's why. Axelrod pulled off a repeat. The guy that brought Obama Iowa's caucus had been out in Virginia forever with this goal in mind. As it turns out, if you give the man enough time, he can do just about anything to a place. Virginia went from being reliably red on election night to surprisingly vulnerable in 06 to now being a safe state for the Democratic Party. What's the big deal with Virginia? It's just one state, right? Hell, a third of it isn't even real. The problem is that Virginia is worth 13 electoral votes, and this year McCain needs every last one of those things that he can get. Without VA, it actually seems extremely difficult if not impossible for him to win. Here's the most realistic (though I say that snickering since this is never going to happen) scenario for McCain to win without VA in his column:
















This shows a McCain win with exactly 270 electoral votes in having flipped Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and New Hampshire. Let me catch my breath, that was a lot of flipping. That's 8 states that have to move significantly. Granted, McCain actually has a shot at taking Ohio, though I am inclined to think that Obama's ground game is going to turn up stronger as we get closer to Nov. 4. Quick summation: the Obama campaign hired 300 paid volunteers to work Ohio as opposed to the normal range of 10-40 (50 if you really want it). North Carolina also seems extremely close, but it is also a state where Obama overperformed his polling in the primaries thanks to the developing tech sector in the north of the state. Florida? Well, John McCain is very old. The rest here, Missouri just doesn't look like they're going to play nice with McCain this time around (Missouri has picked the president correctly every election since 1960).

He isn't going to flip the rest of these. This is why, I imagine, the punditry is still trying to talk about Pennsylvania as if it is a swing state. There's a silver bullet if I've ever seen one, PA has 21 electoral votes (and if he could add that on top of an Ohio win and a Florida win that only gives Obama a 1.18% chance to win the election according to fivethirtyeight!). The problem with this is that Pennsylvania has been in double digits for Obama since the end of September (by which I mean eternity), and Joe Biden is only helping that out. In other words, Pennsylvania is a quick and easy answer to give a soundbyte, or some talking head, but it is one of the blue-r states there is this time around.

Virginia polls close at 7:00pm EST, and North Carolina is just behind closing at 7:30 EST. If both of those states show up blue, this election is over, and possibly before people on the west coast have even had a chance to get out to the polls. That may have implications for Republican turnout, which may have implications for down-ticket races like Gordon Smith in Oregon and Ted Stevens in jail I mean Alaska. In other words, if we know who the president is by 8:00EST (and you may not need the TV to tell you, since they are going to try as hard as possible to keep you up all night tuned into their shows), we may be staring at a landslide across the board. Maybe even a 60 seat senate majority.