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Electoral math

Mr.Nick said:
You think Crook County can beat out the entire state of Illinois? A couple blue counties vs 50 red counties?
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Well considering Cook County makes up more than 40% of Illinois and Obama will probably get more than 70% of the vote there, yes. He wouldn't even need to win the surrounding counties or East St. Louis to win the state.
 
Your Star said:
California is a solid liberal state every time, just like Texas is a strong conservative state. And Obama is not losing Illinois, he's up 15 points according to Real Clear Politics.
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According to Polls that have been wrong in recent years. Yeah, I get it!
 
Anagram said:
Well considering Cook County makes up more than 40% of Illinois and Obama will probably get more than 70% of the vote there, yes. He wouldn't even need to win the surrounding counties or East St. Louis to win the state.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Illinois went for Romney because of low turnout in Cook County.
 
Amigo said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Illinois went for Romney because of low turnout in Cook County.
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That's a pipe-dream and a half.
 
Your Star said:
California is a solid liberal state every time, just like Texas is a strong conservative state. And Obama is not losing Illinois, he's up 15 points according to Real Clear Politics.
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Polls don't mean anything - for republicans or democrats - not to mention polls only sample a small minority of the population which won't and cant give a clear indication on anything.

Maybe they should do a "poll" on who is voting - that might add a little insight into such "polls."

The only poll that matters is on November 6th...
 
Amigo said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Illinois went for Romney because of low turnout in Cook County.
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It'd have to be extraordinarily low turnout. It's turnout was pretty low in 2004 and Kerry still won the state overall by 11%. Plus Obama's got East St. Louis, Rock Island County, and Champaign County too. I don't see Obama losing Illinois as a possibility at all.
 
Mr.Nick said:
Polls don't mean anything - for republicans or democrats - not to mention polls only sample a small minority of the population which won't and cant give a clear indication on anything.

Maybe they should do a "poll" on who is voting - that might add a little insight into such "polls."

The only poll that matters is on November 6th...
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Oh stop. Polls are quite a bit of "everything" that we use to figure matters out. The silliest thing to say is that "the only poll that matters is on (election day)."
 
Mr.Nick said:
Polls don't mean anything - for republicans or democrats - not to mention polls only sample a small minority of the population which won't and cant give a clear indication on anything.
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Polling is usually right, and the size of the population doesn't really matter. 30,000 or 30,000,000, or 30,000,000,000 if you poll 400 people the margin of error is still just 4.9%.
 
Anagram said:
Well considering Cook County makes up more than 40% of Illinois and Obama will probably get more than 70% of the vote there, yes. He wouldn't even need to win the surrounding counties or East St. Louis to win the state.
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It doesn't makeup 40% and Crook County certainly isn't all of Chicago - the county extends well into the burbs (generally republican)...
 
Mr.Nick said:
It doesn't makeup 40% and Crook County certainly isn't all of Chicago - the county extends well into the burbs (generally republican)...
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According to the 2010 Census Cook County makes up 40.5% of all Illinois residents.
 
Anagram said:
Polling is usually right, and the size of the population doesn't really matter. 30,000 or 30,000,000, or 30,000,000,000 if you poll 400 people the margin of error is still just 4.9%.
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Yeah you continue to believe that....

Polling isn't random - I used to do polling. Specific areas or communities are targeted - the methodology is flawed, hence the results.
 
Anagram said:
According to the 2010 Census Cook County makes up 40.5% of all Illinois residents.
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It's less than that now, not to mention - like I said - Crook County is not only Chicago.

Doesn't matter because most of the cities population are drug addicts, drunks, gang bangers, those who have 10 kids that aren't even old enough to legally vote...

The typical democrat voter....

They'll be republicans/libertarians/tea party out in full force looking for the "jump on the bus, fill out this card and vote Obama for a free lunch, cigarettes and 5 bucks" nonsense.
 
Mr.Nick said:
It's less than that now, not to mention - like I said - Crook County is not only Chicago.
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It isn't less than that now. The 2011 estimate actually has Cook County gaining a little bit compared to Illinois as a whole. I never said Cook County is only Chicago either.
 
Anagram said:
You mean the high degree of accuracy?
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No poll(s) weren't accurate.... The demographics certainly spoke for their politics...

Funny part is that (those who had political opinions) and stated them were generally anti-Obama and made that clear via their opinion on a multitude of issues and those who did support Obama were pretty much sheep... Hell I got yelled at by people I agreed with on the issues, but as part of the job I had (and at times wanted to) say: "I agree."

So NO - polls don't mean anything especially when a certain demographic is targeted.
 
Anagram said:
Maybe, but Cook County still has more than 40% of all residents in Illinois.
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No it doesn't - not voting age residents who are legally allowed to vote.... It's not uncommon for a Cook County family to have 12 kids living on welfare, when those same 12 kids would be counted in the census and that is quite common in the ghettos of Chicago...

Cook County and Chicago contains maybe 20-25% of the eligible voting base in Illinois...

How many of them will vote?
 
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Mr.Nick said:
Funny part is that (those who had political opinions) and stated them were generally anti-Obama and made that clear via their opinion on a multitude of issues and those who did support Obama were pretty much sheep..
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Why isn't your conclusion, "conservatives are louder and bigger political-proselytizers than liberals"? Why is it that the polls are wrong? Elections are not determined by the decibel level of the callers nor by your earlier point, the number of counties won.
 
Mr.Nick said:
No it doesn't - not voting age residents who are legally allowed to vote.... It's not common for a Cook County family to have 12 kids living on welfare, when those same 12 kids would be counted in the census and that is quite common in the ghettos of Chicago...

Cook County and Chicago contains maybe 20-25% of the eligible voting base in Illinois...

How many of them will vote?
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Cook County made up 39% of the Illinois vote in 2008 and 37.5% in lower turnout 2010. Even if it dropped to 35%, which is exceedingly generous, Obama would win Illinois if he got 70% of the vote there and got blown out 60%-40% over the rest of the state. All of those are extremely generous to Mitt Romney, and he still wouldn't win.
 
Mr.Nick said:
Cook County and Chicago contains maybe 20-25% of the eligible voting base in Illinois...

How many of them will vote?
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I looked at the year 2004. Cook county made up 38.8% of the votes in Illinois.

Assuming all other counties' numbers remained the same, 64.7% of Cook county voters could have stayed at home in 2004 and Kerry still would have won Illinois.

In 2008, 100% of Cook county could have stayed at home and Obama still would have won Illinois.
 
Anagram said:
Cook County made up 39% of the Illinois vote in 2008 and 37.5% in lower turnout 2010. Even if it dropped to 35%, which is exceedingly generous, Obama would win Illinois if he got 70% of the vote there and got blown out 60%-40% over the rest of the state. All of those are extremely generous to Mitt Romney, and he still wouldn't win.
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Funny considering I "polled" at 25% for Obama, yet I was polled at 45% in overall opinion while (which I don't particularly agree with) 91% favoritism of republicans (whatever that means)...

Polls are wrong all the time - that or words or definitions of words are wrong all the time. I will certainly side with the latter.
 
TitusAndronicus said:
I looked at the year 2004. Cook county made up 38.8% of the votes in Illinois.

Assuming all other counties' numbers remained the same, 64.7% of Cook county voters could have stayed at home in 2004 and Kerry still would have won Illinois.

In 2008, 100% of Cook county could have stayed at home and Obama still would have won Illinois.
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2004? yeah well this is 2008...

I suppose in 2004 there was no housing crisis despite Bush saying there was...
 
Kandahar said:
Since I haven't seen anyone post a thread with electoral math yet, I thought it would be helpful to create one. At this point in the campaign cycle, we can be pretty confident what the "swing states" are going to be on Election Day. There are somewhat fewer this year than there normally are...seven by my count: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida. We can quibble about whether Wisconsin or North Carolina are "swing states," but I'm not counting them even though the polls are still relatively close in those states. This is because they are fairly irrelevant to the electoral math; if Obama loses Wisconsin or Romney loses North Carolina, it will most likely be because they've already lost all the "true" swing states...thus making the electoral math a moot point anyway.

This means that Obama starts out with 247 electoral votes, to Romney's 206. Each candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency outright, although if there is a 269-269 tie, the House of Representatives will pick the president. Since it's controlled by Republicans, it's fair to say that Romney needs 269 electoral votes to win, whereas Obama needs 270.

So what combination of swing states lead to each candidate winning? There are surprisingly few combinations that actually matter...only four by my count. I'm going to go down the list of ways that Obama can win, since his path to victory is a little bit clearer than Romney's. But one can do the same exercise for Romney...it's just the opposite of everything below.

- Florida. If Obama wins Florida's 29 EVs, he wins the election. Period.

- Ohio +1. If Obama wins Ohio's 18 EVs, he needs to also win one of the smaller swing states. Ohio plus New Hampshire won't quite do it...but Ohio plus any of the other smaller swing states will.

- Virginia +2. If Obama wins Virginia's 13 EVs, he needs to win any two of the four smaller swing states.

- All 4 small states. If Obama fails to carry Florida, Ohio, or Virginia, he can still eke out a victory by winning all four of the small swing states (Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire).


Romney's path to victory is essentially just the opposite: make sure that none of these scenarios happen. Which (if any) of these paths to victory do you think is Obama's most likely way to win? How likely do you think it is that Romney will deny him these paths?
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Isn't there some kind of poll that keeps the percentage of likelihood of winning the Electoral College? I heard some analysts say it's very possible the winning could win the electoral college, but not the popular vote.
 
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