Upside and Downside

[barking_iguana]

McCain's upside is receding. Without truly surprising changes to the race, the best he'll be able to do is exactly duplicate the Bush-Gore map. With the post-2000 reapportionment, that would give McCain a 278-260 win.

The best Obama can do without big surprises would be to take the Gore states plus NV, CO, MO, IN (yes, really), OH, NH, VA, NC (uh huh), and FL. That would give Obama a 375-163 win.

Unfortunately, I think the distribution within that range is rather flat, maybe even weighted toward the poles. So even though McCain's victory threshold is over to one end of the range, it is not far-fetched for him to win.

ETA: OK, without getting too extreme (except in how the country is governed) McCain could win PA and MI, too. That's a stretched max for him of a 314-224. But that I do think is unlikely, in a receding tail of the distribution.

Comments

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

If McCain wins, I owe you one get out of the country free card.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

If you had made your life in Canada, as at one point you thought you would, you might have been able to make good on that.

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

How about Sweden?

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

Canada, Minnesota, what’s the difference? We have better cityscape photographers here than Ottawa does. (Truly. I don’t know how Ottawa photographers manage to make the city look so plain.)

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Over on Making Light, TNH says that McCain has 1000 pages of medical recrds that he's not releasing to the press, even though releasing medical records is apparently a fairly common thing for candidates to do. The suggestion is that McCain has Stage III or IV melanoma and knows he won't live a full term as President. Any thoughts?

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he's got something in the records he doesn't want public, but the decision to not release them was made a long time ago. I strongly doubt he went into the primaries knowing he was dying. And I don't doubt at all that we'd be reading such suggestions whether they are true or not.

McCain's secret(s) can include any combination of psychological issues, recurrent but very treatable cancer, an STD, and lots of other stuff.

Motivations for supposing that it's worse include making him deny it, which draws attention to his potential frailty, and hoping people will believe the worst, even if it's not true.

I wouldn't be totally shocked if sometime in the past few months he did get very bad news and is now going through the motions. I'd give rather long odds against it, but it's within the realm of possibility. But I would be totally shocked if a year ago, when his campaign was on the upswing after having almost collapsed, he wasn't looking at a full term or two.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

I've been hearing this for the last week and a half or so. I generally tend to scoff at stuff like that but I honestly thin it's a 50/50 proposition in this case.

The thing that's giving me the most pause is that I'm not sure if people think Obama is going to win because they can't imagine anyone voting for McCain (which is a foolish and short sighted world view) or they they're putting on a game face. While my preference would be to see Obama win by a clear enough margin; I'm afraid that this election is as likely to go in one direction as the other. I think a lot of people will be making up their minds as they approach the polling place.

This will be an interesting Election Day.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I can all to readily imagine people voting for McCain. But the way I interpret the poll data over time leads me to think Obama is at least a 5:3 favorite.

[avram]

FiveThirtyEight.com is currently figuring an almost 80% chance of an Obama win.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know. I think Nate's model is very good at finding the best guess of where the race stands at any given time. I'm less enamored of it as a handicapping tool.

[avram]

He sorta-kinda released his medical records back in May. His campaign let members of the press into a room with the 1500 pages for a short time (three hours) but didn't allow in cameras or cellphones or give them access to copy machines or the Internet. And anyone who left the room wasn't allowed back in.