Friday, September 7, 2012

2012 Presidential Election Map: September Edition

The sprint to Election Day is underway, and only a handful of states remain truly competitive. Both the Romney campaign and Crossroads GPS are at least temporarily pulling out of Pennsylvania and Michigan, two large but expensive states where Republicans were always slightly behind. That leaves Mitt Romney with a narrow but viable path to victory. He must sweep Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, and then win either Wisconsin or, more likely, Iowa.

Fivethirtyeight's state-by-state forecasts show Obama as the favorite in four of the five inner swing states (Silver's model also suggests Colorado is as competitive as Ohio and Iowa, even though Obama's lead in that state has been more persistent). In fact, if you naively multiply Romney's win probabilities in these states, he has a vanishingly small 0.7% chance of winning the Electoral College. Now, obviously, win probabilities in each state are not purely independent. If Mitt Romney wins Wisconsin, that's a strong signal that he will also win Iowa. But it does demonstrate that that Obama is firmly in the drivers seat as we head into the final eight weeks of the election.

7 comments:

low-tech cyclist said...

As I said over at CogBlog, it's essentially a 3-state race now: if Romney sweeps Florida, Virginia, and Ohio, he'll almost certainly win the election, but if he loses even one of those three, Obama almost certainly wins.

My only real assumptions are:

1) It's extremely unlikely that Obama will win NC while getting swept in the other three big swing states: if Romney sweeps FL-VA-OH, he gets NC for free.


2) The eight states everybody's throwing money at (NH, VA, NC, FL, OH, IA, CO, NV) are the only states in play.

In particular, Wisconsin isn't a swing state. Romney's throwing some money at it just to keep the pretense alive that he's still got a path to victory if he loses Ohio, where he's polled badly lately.

The rest, as they say, is left as an exercise for the reader.

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The candidates each raise about $4 million in a year, much less than the double-digit millions you get in big Senate races elsewhere. And it's a cheap media market.

fairingworld said...

It's extremely unlikely that Obama will win NC while getting swept in the other three big swing states: if Romney sweeps FL-VA-OH, he gets NC for free.

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If Mitt Romney wins Wisconsin, that's a strong signal that he will also win Iowa. But it does demonstrate that that Obama is firmly in the drivers seat as we head into the final eight weeks of the election.

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In particular, Wisconsin isn't a swing state. Romney's throwing some money at it just to keep the pretense alive that he's still got a path to victory if he loses Ohio, where he's polled badly lately.
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The eight states everybody's throwing money at (NH, VA, NC, FL, OH, IA, CO, NV) are the only states in play.

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