Romney’s Very Narrow Path To Victory

Posted by | October 28, 2012 15:04 | Filed under: Top Stories


“Long odds,” explains Gabriel Snyder:

While most of the campaign coverage is dominated by familiar cliches of the race being too close to call, nail-biting, and down-to-the-wire, there is arguably a lot more known about the Nov. 6 vote than there is unknown. According to the Constitution, the presidential election is actually 51 separate races. Each of those races is a winner-takes-all contest for a certain number of votes in the Electoral College. (Note: My Atlantic colleague Chris Heller points out this is not entirely correct since Nebraska and Maine award some of their electoral votes proportionally. For the purpose of this math, I assumed those states are winner-take-all.) The presidential candidate who gets 270 or more electoral votes will be the next President. We know the outcome of the vast majority of those 51 contests: New York, California, and Hawaii, and so on, will award their electoral votes to Obama, while Wyoming, Oklahoma, Utah, etc., will award their electoral votes to Romney. In these 41 “known” races, Obama has a huge lead over Romney: 237 electoral votes to 191…

In the nine remaining toss-up states — Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida — there are 110 electoral votes up for grabs, but because Obama needs only 33 of those votes to win re-election, he wins in the vast majority of the possible scenarios. As a mathematical exercise, Romney has just 76 paths to victory out of the 512 possible combinations.

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Copyright 2012 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

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