Cook Political: An Early look At The Electoral College

[brooklynite]

http://cookpolitical.com/story/8806

In less than a year, both parties will have selected their presidential nominees and running mates. With Labor Day, the final stretch of campaign 2016 will begin. Unfortunately most Americans will view the election through the lens of national polls. However it won’t be one national election. Instead, it will be 51 separate elections, one for each state and the District of Columbia (except for Maine and Nebraska, which allocate their Electoral votes by who wins each Congressional district, with the two other votes going to the statewide winner). Watching the national polls after Labor Day is a bit like going to a football game and focusing exclusively on total yardage gained, or a baseball game and only watching the number of hits by each team. Those numbers are useful and interesting metrics, but they aren’t victor-determining. And every once in a while, like in 1876, 1888 and 2000, one candidate wins the national popular vote and the other the Electoral College and with it, the election.

Effectively there are only about a dozen states that are actually in play: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. From 1968 to 2008, Indiana voted Republican in every election. It reverted back into the GOP fold in 2012 and doesn’t look likely to stray in 2016. Even within those dozen competitive states, a subset can be drawn. In the 2012 general election, of the $896 million that was spent on broadcast television advertising, 84 percent of it was spent on just seven states according to Kantar Media CMAG: Florida ($173 million, or 19%), Virginia ($151 million, 17%), Ohio ($150 million, 17%), North Carolina ($97 million, 11%), Colorado, ($73 million, 8%), Iowa ($57 million, 6%) and Nevada ($55 million, 6%).

It’s useful to start to look at the Electoral College as a sequence of states, going from the most Democratic to the most Republican (or vise versa) with the swing states towards the middle of the list. The Electoral vote can be viewed cumulatively, or by the states each side would need to get over the 270 majority necessary to win the election outright -- without turning the race over to the House of Representatives where each state would have exactly one vote (e.g. Wyoming one vote, California one vote).

For the sake of our ranking, we look at the last six presidential elections, 1992-2012. The first chart ranks the states, those that have gone to Democrats six times in a row, followed by those who sided with Democrats five times, then four times, then those that split an even three and three. The lower half of the chart includes states that have gone Republican four times in a row, then five times, finally all of the last six. Within each group, the states are ranked by their 2012 two-party result (factoring out minor party votes). One can look at the next to last column and read downward, from the Democratic perspective or the last column and read upward, from the Republican point of view. The second chart displays much the same data but ranked by the performance in the most recent, 2012 election only.