Romney vs the numbers

Chris Cillizza of the Post has some interesting numbers when it comes to Romney getting the electoral college's vote.

It’s no secret that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has a narrow path to win the presidency this fall. Nowhere is that reality more apparent than when examining the electoral map on which Romney and President Obama will battle in November.

A detailed analysis of Romney’s various paths to the 270 electoral votes he would need to claim the presidency suggests he has a ceiling of somewhere right around 290 electoral votes.

While Romney’s team would absolutely take a 290-electoral-vote victory, that means he has only 20 electoral votes to play with — a paper-thin margin for error.

Romney’s relatively low electoral-vote ceiling isn’t unique to him. No Republican presidential nominee has received more than 300 electoral votes in more than two decades. ...WaPo

The states with the most electoral votes are all in Obama's pocket.  Except Texas.

The only major electoral-vote treasure trove that is reliably Republican at the moment is Texas, with its 38 electoral votes. So while George W. Bush won 30 states in 2000 and 31 states in 2004, he never came close to cresting the 300-electoral-vote mark in either race. ...WaPo

Texas is swinging back towards Democrats, however.  Not before the November election, and certainly not during a November election in which the Mexican-American population is being disenfranchised by the Republican legislature (ALEC). 

But that's not the whole story.  Texas' population has been growing rapidly over the past few years, fed by populations from other parts of the country.  Many of the newcomers turn out to lean left and centrist.  Counties where the few Democrats were -- seriously -- blocked from voting now have flourishing county Democratic party organizations, protests, and percentages.  The changes are slow.  But they're coming.

Comments

[toto]

We are 49% of the way to changes.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in more than 3/4ths of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the primaries.

When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.

The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.

The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

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[Anthony Dunn]

Good luck in seeing future Presidential elections being determined by a simple plurality (50% plus one vote) or the largest number when there are more than two candidates. Our experience in the UK is that the right-wing will do everything it possibly can to oppose or delay democratic reform be that the voting system for the House of Commons (equivalent to the House) or the House of Lords (your Senate). When it comes to the defence of patronage and privilege, there is nothing that Conservatives/conservatives will not do to defend their interests.

[PW]

Before we do anything else -- this is in response to both toto and Anthony - we need to keep the right's cotton-pickin' hands off actual votes. Between the efforts of Republican majorities in state legislatures to prevent likely Democrats from even getting to the voting booth, and the efforts in the recent past to tamper with electronic voting machines, we have a long way to go before getting something that comes anywhere near a fair vote.

Many Americans have a habit of pointing at unnamed nations in the southern hemisphere for their barbaric third-worldliness. These critics don't seem to have noticed how often, lately, we've crossed the equator into that territory ourselves.