An American Election PredictionNews
Inthe last edition of The Regis I made a number of politicalpredictions for 2012. I wrote that Mitt Romney would become theRepublican nominee, that Barack Obama would win the election, andthat either Tom Mulcair or Brian Topp would assume leadership of theNew Democrats.
As the next edition of this publication will not be published until after the American election, I wish to layout my predictions for the White House race.Many who study an election often look to national public opinion polls to make a formal prediction. And if you were to go by the Gallup daily tracking poll, the race between Obama and Romney seems to be in a statistical tie. What people often forget however, is that the President is not elected directly by the American people but rather by the electoral college. In order to ascend to the presidency, a candidate must win 270 electoral votes. Each state has a certain number of votes to allocate, based on its population. Electoral College votes are distributed via first-past-the-post system.
This means that even if Obama wins Ohio by 0.2% he takes all of its votes, and Romney gets none. There have been times in American history where a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the electoral college (this was the case for Al Gore in 2000). While my projections show Barack Obama with a strong lead in the electoral college, I predict that the popular vote will be much closer – significantly than in 2008. A few things to note about this projection: I am basing it off of polls in the dog days of summer (I am writing this on August, 17). Americans don’t really get into election mode until after labour day. Also, Mitt Romney is expected to outraise Obama by millions of dollars; how he strategically spends his resources could alter the race. Most electoral projections do not make predictions for states where the candidate leading is only ahead by 2-3 points.
For the sake of being bold, I have not done this and have offered a prediction for every single state. As the risk of being horribly embarrassed on November 6th, my projections are as follows: Barack Obama wins his re-election bid with 332 electoral college votes while Mitt Romney falls behind with 206 votes. Refer to the electoral map for my prediction on each state.
DaveEnnett is a fourth year Political Science student. This is his secondyear writing for the Regis. You can read more of his ramblingpolitical thoughts at www.davidennett.com
