March 8, 2000

Super Tuesday has come and gone; all that is left of the primary season is to shoot the wounded and cart off the bodies for a decent burial. For the rest of us, this is the first day of the general election campaign.

On TV, in print, and on the Internet, the usual suspects are bloviating away about the independent vote, the Catholic vote, the left-handed-soccer-moms-who-voted-for-Perot-in-'92 vote, and whatever have you. By sheer statistical chance some will probably get it right.

I'll take a bit of a different tack, and start with a look at that vermiform appendix of the Constitution, the Electoral College. As you all remember from 10th grade civics (you were paying attention, weren't you?), you and I don't elect the President; we only vote for electors, who then choose the prez. Every state gets electoral votes equal to its combined House members and Senators, plus three thrown in for the District of Columbia. That comes to a total of 538 electoral votes, with 270 the magic number needed to win.

On paper, the Electoral College overrepresents "small" (i.e., low-population) states. In real elections, though, it doesn't quite work out that way. The entire mountain-desert West and High Plains, taken together -- Idaho, Montana, both Dakotas, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico combined, with Alaska thrown in for good measure -- have exactly 54 electoral votes. So does California. Guess where campaigns put their effort? (More precisely, the dread of California Republicans is that the Bush campaign won't put much effort into the Big Enchilada.)

What's more, when it comes to electoral votes almost all the states are winner-take-all. (The only exceptions are Nebraska and Maine, with a whalloping 9 electoral votes between them.) The Democratic candidate -- let's just say Al Gore -- could lose every one of those interior Western states by a landslide and make it all up with a 50.1 percent squeaker in California. In fact, he probably will lose most of them by a landslide ... but win California by a whole lot more than a squeaker.

So the real-world electoral system leans heavily on a few battleground states, big ones with lots of electoral votes that might go either way. Obviously not every big state is a battleground; Gore probably won't put a major effort into Texas.

We'll work our way to the battleground states in a moment, but for now step back from the classroom wall map and look at broader regions. The latest poll, NBC News/Wall St. Journal, has Gore and Bush running dead even nationally -- 46-up. (The end, by the way, of Bush's yearlong lead in the national trial heats.) When you look at the poll by regions, though, it gets interesting.

In the South, Bush leads by a massive 16-point margin. He'd be elected president of the Confederacy in a landslide. But in every other region, Gore is ahead -- by four points in the West, nine points in the Midwest, and 10 points in the Northeast. (By odd coincidence, that's where McCain won most of the GOP primaries.) The South has the most electoral votes of any one region ... but if the election went by regions, Gore would crush Bush.

Of course, the regions themselves have sub-regions. The interior West is massively Republican; the West Coast is Democratic. And there are oddball states. Indiana almost always goes Republican, even when all the other Great Lakes states go Dem; Tennessee is Southron as they come, but will doubtless vote for homeboy Al this fall.

By and large, though, the two parties have distinct geographical bases: the West Coast and the Northeast for the Dems, the South and the interior West for the GOP. The Midwest is the typical battleground -- for reasons you're about to see.

But -- back to civics class again -- it all comes down in the end to states. There is a handy web site, right here, where you can play around with the electoral map, assigning states to each party to see how the numbers come out. (Running the simulator requires a Java-enabled browser.)

I tried a few runs on it today, experimenting with various permutations. To start with, I assigned base states and strong leaners to each party -- the states Gore or Bush should expect to win in a close, competitive election. I deliberately made slightly GOP-friendly assumptions to come up with the following list:

(Each state is listed with its electoral votes, running roughly west to east.)

Democratic Base States:

Hawaii -- 4
Washington -- 11
Oregon -- 7
California -- 54
Minnesota -- 10
Tennessee -- 11
West Virginia -- 5
District of Columbia -- 3
New York -- 33
Connecticut -- 8
Rhode Island -- 4
Massachusetts -- 12
Vermont -- 3
New Hampshire -- 4
Maine -- 4

15 States = 173 Electoral Votes

Basically the West Coast and the Northeast. I threw in West Virginia because it went Dem every time in the last 20 years except 1984.

Republican Base States:

Alaska -- 3
Idaho -- 4
Utah -- 5
Arizona -- 8
Montana -- 3
Wyoming -- 3
Colorado -- 8
North Dakota -- 3
South Dakota -- 3
Nebraska -- 5
Kansas -- 6
Oklahoma -- 8
Texas -- 32
Arkansas -- 6
Louisiana -- 9
Mississippi -- 7
Alabama -- 9
Florida -- 25
Georgia -- 13
South Carolina -- 8
North Carolina -- 14
Virginia -- 13
Indiana -- 12

23 States = 207 Electoral Votes

Basically the interior West and the South, plus Indiana, minus Nevada and New Mexico, which have usually gone Dem. Florida went Democratic in '96, but it has a governor named Bush. Louisiana and Arkansas went Dem in both '92 and '96, but Louisiana is next to Texas, and Bill Clinton won't be on the ballot.

In this slightly GOP-skewed base assignment, the Republicans start out with a 34-vote advantage in the Electoral Collage, but still over sixty votes shy of what they need to.

Now, five big industrial swing states, running from the Great Lakes to the Midatlantic:

Illinois -- 22
Michigan -- 18
Ohio -- 21
Pennsylvania -- 23
New Jersey -- 15

5 States = 99 Electoral Votes

TA-DA!  These, no surprise, are the battleground states. All competitive, all more or less end to end -- handy for campaign scheduling -- and all with hefty double-digit electoral votes. Oh, yes, and all five went for Clinton both times. In fact, if Al Gore carried only these five states in addition to the Dem base states, he'd just pull through to victory with 272 electoral votes.

This, then, can be considered a baseline Democratic victory combination. The flip side, of course, is that if Gore loses more than one or two of these states the going gets tough. There are, however, another eight states I list as swing states, where Gore could go to make up a loss of a major swing state:

Nevada -- 4
New Mexico -- 5
Wisconsin -- 11
Iowa -- 7
Missouri -- 11
Kentucky -- 8
Maryland -- 10
Delaware -- 3

8 States = 59 Electoral Votes

Except for Nevada and New Mexico, they are all grouped pretty closely around the five big swing states: Win the Big Five and you're likely to win most of these as well. Clinton carried them all, both times. In the Southwest, Nevada has been gradually trending Republican, and New Mexico may suffer a spillover effect from Texas, but they could also still be in reach for Gore -- for a total of 331 electoral votes, or 61 votes to spare.

After this the going gets steeper; you have to cherry-pick states I assigned to the GOP base. But hey, let's give it a try!

Working west to east as usual, Arizona went for Clinton in '96, and they may not be so happy at the way Bush trashed homeboy McCain. Arkansas gave the world Bill Clinton, and Louisiana gave us James Carville; both have a sort of gumbo progressive tradition. All of these might just be in reach.

Then there's Florida. Yeah, it has a guy named Bush in the statehouse -- but he's just run into a buzz saw over his plan to trash affirmative action. And Floridians might decide their first priority in life isn't putting their gov's big brother in the White House.

Added to the Democratic pot, these states bring it up to 379 electoral votes. Impossible, you say! I must be inhaling, or something. Well, it isn't, and I'm not. As it happens -- by one of those odd coincidences in political life -- the states I've listed here are exactly the ones Bill Clinton won in 1996.

(Okay, I admit it -- when I was working out these numbers, I originally called it a bit differently, with Kentucky and Arizona going to the GOP and Colorado to the Dems. But hey, good enough for government work! I was genuinely startled at how closely my projection turned out to match the '96 Clinton electoral map.)

And there you have it. If Gore holds the Democratic base states and carries the Big Five swing states, or their electoral equivalent, he shuts out the GOP for three in a row. Everything past that is gravy ... and Bill Clinton has shown us that there's plenty of gravy to be had. IF we're willing to work for it.

-- Rick Robinson

Visit the Electoral College simulator

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Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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