Isn't it unfair that the Ohio vote can be so close, and yet Bush gets all 20 EVs?
For a clearer and fairer picture of how much electoral power each candidate has in Ohio, you only have to look at it proportionally. Kerry got 48.5% of the Ohio vote (so far). Bush got 51%. So that means that Kerry actually had 9.7 EVs worth of "electoral power" in Ohio, and Bush had 10.2 . (Provisional votes may change this, but only a couple of tenths at most.)
Just for the sake of study, that's how much electoral power each candidate had in Ohio. So, what about the rest of the states?
It's pretty interesting. We find that in places like Florida, it would mean that Kerry gets about 12.7 EVs, and Bush gets about 14.1 EVs. It's how much electoral power each candidate
really has, and we'd expect that on average, the overall national result would track with this pretty closely, in close elections.
So, if we did that for all states and added it up? Here's what we get:
Bush: 275.293
Kerry: 257.596
Nader: 1.9379
Other: 3.1731
Hmm, that's interesting. Bush actually had more electoral power than Kerry, even if you take away the unfair "winner-take-all" aspect of the electoral college.
Now, there are some good counterpoints to this approach. For one thing, in safe states, there is less motivation for the losing candidate to vote. The level of support might be skewed. But on the other hand, the vote nationwide is pretty close. Both candidates have safe states. Overall, while this may be true, it pretty much cancels itself out for national elections.
It turns out that using this approach is a good way to illustrate how much raw electoral power each candidate has.
Many of us are familiar with electoral-vote.com. It collected the Registered-Voter numbers for every single state poll of the presidential election. The last sixty days of the polls are available in one big collection.
I decided to apply this technique to those polls. For example, I looked at all the polls that were asking questions on September 1st. If multiple polls were active in a state on that day, I averaged them. If there were none, I'd use the most recent set of polls for that state. I might find that Kerry had 52% and Bush had 47%. I would then award 52% of that state's EVs to Kerry, and 47% of them to Bush. I did that for every state to get total electoral power for each candidate, for that day. Then, I did that for each of the last 60 days.
Here is the graph:
(click to enlarge)
They are both under 270 due to undecided voters, but it shows that Bush clearly had more electoral power for almost the entire last 60 days. The only time it came close appears to line up to right after the third debate, right before the right started squawking about Mary Cheney.
Some of you have argued with me about "electoral power" before, but I believe it is useful. It shows who has broader support in the nation, not according to the national vote, but according to what matters: the underlying physics of the Electoral College. If one candidate is at a clear disadvantage in electoral power, then it means that the candidate will have to win more close states than the other candidate to win. They have to do this in order to make up for the advantage the other candidate has in electoral power.
And I believe that's a bad situation to be in. If a state is close, the whole point is that it could go either way. If a state is really close, then on average you can really only expect to get half of them.
Of the ten closest states, Kerry got six of them for 69 EVs. Bush got four of them for 37 EVs. And yet, Bush still won.
This discussion would not be complete without addressing fraud. Since this study looks at the EVs in a proportional manner, it means that a swing of 150,000 votes here or there doesn't make a big difference in each candidate's raw electoral power. If the fraud existed and were enough to affect several million votes (over 2% of the votes), then that would make the difference. But I don't believe we've seen the evidence to suggest that is what has happened. I believe Bush really did have more electoral power. This is backed up by the poll data above. The poll data uses lots of different polls from different pollsters - if some of them were fraudulent, then the lines would be jumping around a lot more. I believe Bush really did have more electoral power.
So, the conclusion? We clearly have a deficit in electoral power compared to the Republicans. I believe the strategy of conceding the safe states and attempting to cherry-pick the majority of the battlegrounds is a losing strategy. In order for us to have a better chance to win future elections, we need to increase our electoral power. And in my mind, this means nationalizing the race. Another way of looking at it is this: say we really do need to reach an extra 200,000 voters in Ohio. How are we going to do that? Our turnout is already good. What are the chances of us implementing a strategy to only turn out an extra 200k voters in Ohio, but nowhere else? It would have to be so localized and targeted that it could easily come across as a pander. More likely and more effective would be a nationalized message that would get the 200k extra in Ohio, but would also flip millions of voters in the rest of the nation.
I have been very discouraged lately with some of the discussions on this site. I believe that trying to uncover fraud, and fighting for a paper trail are important, worthwhile, principled actions. I have been loudly advocating paper trails since the last election. But many people here are defending the point of view that we were the rightful winners in this election - that if the vote had only been fair, we would have won, by a lot. I think this is denial, and I think that denial is dangerous.
I would ask people, even if you are not convinced that we are not in the minority, to consider this. Consider the possibility that we actually are in the minority. Would it not be important to accept this? Wouldn't it be necessary to accept it, in order to realize what we need to do to build up our chances of winning in the future? If it were actually true, wouldn't the refusal to admit it decrease the chances of us doing what it takes to fix the problem?
Are you open to the possibility that we actually are in the minority?
Thanks for listening.
