Surrendering the Big States

A long time ago, I made the observation that someone could win the presidency by just winning the 11 largest states. This, of course, required a candidate to win states as divergent as Texas and New York. I left it as a unlikely hypothetical theory.

Thinking about the most recent election I realized that McCain didn't win many heavily populated states. So I looked it up and found that of the 11 most populated states, McCain only won two, Texas and Georgia. This left Obama with the other 9, a grand total of 222 electoral votes. That's not to say he won them easily, North Carolina and Ohio were neck-and-neck during the month leading to the election.

The Electoral College system has been criticized for over-representing small states, the chances of winning off of this advantage is close to nil. Republicans are generally thought to be favored in this over-representation due to the western states, however, the New England states, which favor the Democrats, are just as over-represented. In fact, the combined vote of the 15 most over-represented states is completely canceled out by California, and of those 15, Obama won 7 and McCain won 8, coincidentally, the same as in 2004. Certainly, the combined population of all those states is less than half of California, so fewer voters would need to be won over, but strategically, it's probably better to focus on winning one state than 15.

The Democrats winning in the big states give them a huge advantage, whereas just a fifty percent win in California would guarantee 55 votes, an average fifty percent win among the most over-represented states would not even guarantee half those electoral votes. In fact, Obama won an average of around 52% among the most over-represented states, but won less than half of their electoral votes.

While it's unlikely that the Democrats could maintain their wins among the big states, the advantage they have with the big states means that they have to be competitive in fewer states. By continuing to focus on rural voters, "Real America", the Republicans have basically conceded any state with a major population center. This could present a real problem for Republicans in future elections.

Random Election Update

So I was wrong about it getting worse for the third parties. They managed a collective 1.34% according to preliminary numbers. So not exactly a good year for third parties, but all of the consistent third parties managed to increase their votes this time around except for the socialist parties.

One thing I started thinking about while driving back to Maggie Valley today, Perdue will be the first female governor of North Carolina. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard anything about this before. Also, Elizabeth Dole was the first female senator from North Carolina and has now lost to another female candidate in what is probably the first major election between two female candidates in North Carolina. This plus the fact that North Carolina narrowly elected Obama really shows that North Carolina is becoming more progressive.

While checking to see if in fact Dole was the first female senator, I've discovered that no senator has been able to hold the Class 3 Senate seat for more than one term since Senator Ervin retired in 1974. He held the office for 20 years. This does not bode well for Richard Burr, whom I have not heard a word about since he won back in 2004.

The Non-Religious Vote

I've been going through exit polls past and present and among other patterns, I've noticed that the number of voters that give "none" as their religion has been increasing every election, albeit slowly. Not only that, but these non-religious voters appear to be getting more Democratic every year.

1996 - 7% None - 56% for Clinton
2000 - 9% None - 61% for Gore
2004 - 10% None - 67% for Kerry
2008 - 12% None - 75% for Obama

These non-religious voters seem to be coming from formerly Jewish and other minority religious voters as the percentage of Christian voters has remained steady since 2000 at about 81% after falling 5% between 1996 and 2000. Since Jews and other religious minorities tend to vote for Democrats, then it kind of makes sense that the non-religious voters would vote for Democrats.

In other news, Jewish voters apparently didn't hear that Obama was a Muslim that will destroy Israel as 78% voted for him. Either that, or people who called Obama a Muslim were racist who felt more comfortable saying they didn't want to vote for a "Muslim" than a black man.

Bad year for third parties?

As is stated every election, voting for a third party is pointless, steals votes from more viable candidates, etc. Certainly, after the 2000 election, people are skittish about voting for third parties if not out right opposed. However, even after the 2000 debacle, 2004 wasn't the worst year for third parties, although it was pretty bad. Every year since 1992, the number of third party votes has declined. Of course, 1992 was an exceptional year, it certainly seems to set a pretty strong trend.

Year - Total Third Party Vote
1992 - 19.55%
1996 - 10.05%
2000 - 3.74%
2004 - 1.00%

According to a regression model I made, this would mean that in 2008, third parties would only get 0.44%. Of course, the third parties do have a few things going for them. For one, the Libertarian Party and Green Party are running former congress members as their candidates. So for once, the third parties are running experienced candidates. Unfortunately, most Libertarians seem disappointed with Bob Barr who is more or less just a Republican and the Green Party candidate is a nutjob whose ability to maintain her seat for 12 years completely shocks me. For those interested, Nader is running again, but I think he'll do worse than he did last time.

Best Political Blunder

Republican Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, appeared on MSNBC to drum up support for McCain by criticizing Obama and his connections to Bill Ayers. In the course of the interview she insinuated that people with liberal views were anti-American and that members of congress should be investigated for holding anti-American views. This set off an interesting chain of events:

-Instead of energizing the Republican base, it energized the Democratic base, angry about being called anti-American.
-By the next morning Bachmann's opponent, Tinklenberg, had raised roughly half a million dollars.
-The DCCC (which helps funds Democratic candidates) gave Tinklenberg's campaign $1 million having previously ignored the campaign.
-The RNCC (which helps funds Republican candidates) dropped funding for two TV ads it was running for Bachmann.
-A former Republican governor of Minnesota endorsed Obama citing Bachmann's comments as a turning point for him.
-Polling from before the interview had Bachmann ahead by 3%, afterwards Tinklenberg was ahead by 4%
-40% of voters in her district said that they were less likely to vote for her because of her comments. Only 8% said they were more likely to vote for her.

It's a good day for democracy when people realize that criticizing traditional political beliefs isn't treasonous.

2008 Election Trends

A long time ago, I made some charts using data from the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections to predict possible trends in how states vote. I did this by removing the overall swing from each state's results and looked out how votes in each individual state changed independent of national trends. I then extrapolated these numbers to find what the results might be in 2008. One of the things I found was that many of the states that were very close in the 2004 election were trending towards becoming more Democratic, but nearly all of the states that were trending towards Republican were already Republican. Based on these trends I found that if the final popular vote in 2008 was exactly the same as in 2004, the Democrats would gain 10 electoral votes, from Nevada and New Mexico. Not enough to win, but give the Democrats just a 1% swing, they would win Iowa, Ohio, and Colorado and thus the presidency. To win, Republicans would have to keep the national swing towards the Democrats to less than 1%.

I had forgotten about all this for several months, but I became interested again after North Carolina became a swing state. I didn't remember anything in my model saying that North Carolina could go Democrat even in the best scenario. I used the current numbers (as of Oct. 12) on Fivethirtyeight.com to find the predicted swing for the 2008 election, 7.9%. Putting this number into my model gives McCain just a 3% lead in North Carolina. While this is still a comfortable lead for McCain, it's much closer than Bush's 12.4% margin of victory in 2004. I found a lot of other random things in my model when comparing it to the current polls, like Obama is doing incredibly well in Alaska despite Sarah Palin, but I'll leave all that until after the election.

Now I have to eat kangaroos

BBC News

Whenever I go to a restaurant that serves buffalo, I have to get a buffalo burger. My reason for this is that in the regions were buffalo live, they are better for the environment than cattle. So by choosing buffalo over beef, I'm, hopefully, creating demand to shift ranches from cattle to buffalo production.

Now it seems that I should add kangaroos as a food I should always get if a restaurant serves it. Kangaroos produce much less methane than cattle so they're better for environment in terms of climate change. I would also imagine that they're better also for the local environment just like buffalo are. One problem though, I've never been to a restaurant that had kangaroo meat on the menu.