BO & The Chip Man
Also known as “The US Presidential Election”. Some people would suggest that I, as a UK citizen, haven’t really got any right to have an opinion about the election. That’s nonsense. I haven’t got any right to vote in the US election, but I’m entitled to have an opinion on it.
Firstly, I think it’s slightly unfortunate that Barack Obama has initials which are commonly used for body odour, but to counter-balance this, the name McCain is associated in the UK primarily with a manufacturer of oven chips, so as far as names go, neither of them scores with me.
Having said that, I tend to be a leftie, so if I was in the US I would probably (read: almost definitely) vote Democrat. But it’s not up to me: it’s up to the US electorate — and in particular the electoral college — to decide who they want. And as a believer in democracy (a democrat with a small ‘d’) I firmly believe that the people should elect a government even if — and this is the important bit — it isn’t the one I would choose. And I would like to hope that my readers — whether lefties, righties or otherwise — would respect that everyone has a right to their opinion, and just because someone else thinks differently to you doesn’t automatically make them a bad person.
Okay, lecture over. Now let’s get back to the politics…
The UK election works like this: you vote for a local representative (a MP) at the election. Whichever side ends up with the greatest number of MPs gets invited to form a government.
The US system is slightly different. You vote for a president at State level. Whoever wins that state gets all of the “points” for that state (these are actually electoral college votes but it’s just as easy to think of them as points). Some states are worth more than others, because there are more people in them. For example, California is worth 55 points, Texas is worth 34, but Alaska is only worth three points and New Mexico 5. This would mean that if you won California by 51% to 49%, yet lost Texas, Alaska and New Mexico by 80% to 20%, you would still have more points than your opponent.
For example, in 2000, ‘Dubya’ picked up a handful more votes in Florida than … whoever it was … but picked up all 27 Florida points.
So in that respect what is important in the US election is not so much the overall share of the vote, but how that breaks down on a state-by-state basis. There is an interesting site called Electoral Vote which looks at the state by state polls, taking into account the +/- 3% margins for error, and has produced a map of these results. (Note: I first found this on Paul’s site some time ago)
And this would seem to show that Obama is heading for a quite convincing victory. As it stands today, this would see Obama with 357 points, well past the 270 mark that he needs to win. This is actually a slightly smaller margin than projected by a similar pro-Republican site, which suggests Obama will pick up 369 points.
As it stands, even if McCain were to win all of the States were Obama is currently polled as having a lead of 5% or less, in addition to his current states, Obama would still end up past the victory mark with 289 votes. Now as we all know opinion polls can be wrong (although in general they are improving) and the national spread of opinion polls seems to be treated seriously by the media — yet as Paul has already pointed out, little mention appears to have been made to the electoral college map, which shows Obama in quite a comfortable position…
Now you’re perfectly entitled to claim that I am biased here, as I have said that I probably would have voted Democrat, but I really, really, didn’t like Dubya, yet the fact he has been President has seemed to make little impact on my life. It’s almost as if it’s in a different country….
Note that I’m not saying that this situation can’t change; just that it’s important to remember that it’s the electoral college vote that counts, not the popular vote (as Kerry found out to his cost!) and that in the electoral college, it is at present looking very solidly Obama. And as Paul has pointed out, that’s where the odd thing is: the media don’t appear to be looking at this and until very recently were still talking about the election as being pretty close (note this was drafted before the final debate, so that might shift things about a bit too)
…but I’m sure I’ve got more weeks of incessant polling and predictions to come (it must be even worse for anyone in the US!) which at the end actually mean nothing. There is only one vote that counts, after all! But at least I’ve learned something new: why “Republican” is frequently shortened to GOP…
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“Whoever wins that state gets all of the “points” for that state”
There’s a twist. Two states, Nebraska and Maine spilt their college votes, by their electoral districts. And in Nebraska there’s a chance one might go to Obama.
The ‘points’ are their senators plus their representatives.
Another minor point is that the electors chosen for the college aren’t actually bound to vote as they’re supposed, though some states have laws which try to force them to.