A psephologist is someone who simply eats lives and breathes the sways and nuances and surges of voter opinion, burying themselves in electoral statistics, voting boundaries, and opinion polls, to try and divine what is likely to happen in any given election. So far I haven’t got a major election wrong in over 30 years in any jurisdiction I have turned my mind to, but I will freely admit this Presidential election is fascinatingly obtuse and difficult to parse.
I am not a professional psephologist by any means. I am, however, a really sad anoraky type who would rather spend hours working out a likely election result than just about anything other than watching my beloved Southampton FC win easily. (Preferably against Portsmouth, but honestly, any win will do.)
This little play toy is, therefore, much like heroin to an opiate addict for me.
Click on the map or this:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/obama_vs_romney_create_your_own_electoral_college_map.html
Just click on a state and give it to one of the candidates, and bingo, the updated expected electoral college vote materialises.
You wanna know what all the apparatchiks and backroom boys do all day in the Obama and Romney camp? This! Wanna feel like you’re Josh Lyman living an episode of “West Wing”? Here it is.
Get rid of all the swing states at a touch of a button and award them to the current leader in that state. See that? Way cool. (Yes, the current electoral standing in each state is there too to make life easy for you.)
Think Romney will pull a surprise in Ohio, or flop unexpectedly in Florida? At the touch of a keypad or mouse it’s all yours.
Last time around this little tool won me a lot of money at the bookies by allowing me to correctly pick Obama’s tally. So go for your life, if you think you know what’s going on. But all care, and no responsibility, eh? Don’t blame me if they take you to the cleaners. This is the hardest election to call accurately in a l0ng time.
If you wanna know what I think, I have different scenarios running currently: Romney winning by a few, and Obama winning by a lot, depending on what happens in the next few days. In other words, it’s still too early to tell.
In summary, I still think the “win all the swing states” bar for Romney/Ryan is set too high, but we shall see what we shall see …
Really, it’s better than sex, innit?
Well, This Is What I Think 