This Race Is Not Even Close (Take A Look At This)!

[berni_mccoy]

A few weeks ago, I introduced a metric of how strong a candidate's electoral votes are, or in other words, the strength of their electoral votes (see http://journals.democraticunderground.com/berni_mccoy/398 ).

The basic idea is to weight each candidates electoral votes (based on current polling results from http://www.electoral-vote.com ) based on the percent win margin for those votes. Tied electoral votes are not counted for either candidate.

Presently, from ev.com, Obama has 316 electoral votes to McCain's 209. This would be a landslide victory in any election year. However, if the majority of those 316 votes were from weak or barely, I don't think any of us would be comfortable with those numbers. That's the idea for the EV strength metric: how comfortable can we be with the current EV numbers?

To give you an idea, a EV Strength factor of 100% would mean that Obama has all of his 316 EV's by a margin of greater than 10%. On the contrary, a 50% EV Strength rating would mean he could only count on half of those 316 EVs or, he could be comfortable knowing he would very likely win about 158 of them.

Presently, Obama's EV Strength rating is at 88% (his low was 81% on Jun 11, his high was 92% on Jul 18).
Looking at McCain, his current EV Strength rating is 53% (low of 46% on Jun 29, high of 69% on Jun 11).

Based on EV Strength, we can project, very comfortably, that Obama will take at least 278 EVs while McCain will take at least 110. That still leaves 150 EVs up for grabs, but even if McCain wins every single one, he can't win.

To give you an idea on how these numbers are trending, we've settled into a very stable period of EV Strength. Below is a graph of EV Strength since Obama won the nomination.


To give you an idea on how far apart the race is, I've created a ratio based on each candidates EV Strength. The ratio represents Obama's EV Strength compared to McCain. Presently, the ratio is 1.68 (high of 1.87 on Jun 29 and low of 1.17 on Jun 11). That means Obama's EV count is 68% stronger than McCain's, or that the EV spread itself is strong. At 2.0, this would mean that Obama's EVs are twice as strong as McCain's.

Below is a graph that shows the trend of the relative EV Strength (Obama-to-McCain):


So, remember this, while the race may look close from a popular vote polls, it's anything but close from the Electoral Vote perspective.