My updated electoral map. Obama 294. (Maybe 303)

[cthulu2016]

http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=bcHw

In my forays to 270towin.com I have been at Obama 271 to 281 for a month, but I think a couple more swing states are blue enough to call.

Obama 294 or 303. Colorado is too close to call for me. But given everything, I think Virginia, New Hampshire and Iowa will be blue. FL and NC red.

Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada are not very swingy this late in the game.

Bonus prediction: Sandy really does make the chance of a popular vote/electoral college split more plausible. If we see voting drop offs in NJ, NY, and even eastern PA Obama could conceivably lose the popular vote while winning 300+ electoral votes. It is not likely, but it's possible. I don't expect that, but I predict that the popular vote will be fairly close nationally... within 2-4 million. Close, but with Obama winning both EV and probably popular vote by more than Bush over Kerry in 2004. (The margin in 2008, over McCain, was 9.5 million.)

A cool thing. See how short the URL is for my electoral map? "mapid=bcHw" I don't know how many user maps 270towin racks up, but surely more than 10,000. Using letters instead of numbers is base-26 versus base-10. There are 457,000 unique combinations of four letters. All ID numbers would be much shorter using letters, and a modern computer doesn't much care.

[Kalidurga]

1. Looks about right.

Except I would put Florida in the Obama win column and give Romney, Colorado. I am tempted to say Obama is going to get North Carolina as well, but I am not quite that confident.

[cthulu2016]

2. If Obama has a great night NC and FL would fall

But I am reluctant to predict great as my sense of the average election night given what we think we know to date.

Bluing Virginia is a big deal for me because my working assumption throughout this campaign has been that states with large southern racist populations (FL, NC, VA) are slightly tougher for us than their polls show. Not a lot... maybe just 1%, but enough to matter in a razor-thin situation.

I do not mean to say that all of VA and FL and NC are deeply racist whites. But they have large portions of the state like that and I think they may outperform every so slightly, the way fundementalists did in 2004.

(I live in the "good" part of VA and people are still unbelievably racist.)

So if VA and CO were both exactly tied in polls I'd lean CO to Obama and VA to Romney, but VA polling has been a little stronger than CO.