Talk Elections

Neither is particularly likely, though looking at national vs. state polling averages, Option 1 is looking far more likely as of today. Which is actually kind of ironic seeing as Republicans are more likely to support retaining the electoral college, I suspect in large part because they think it favors them because of what happened back in 2000. It would be interesting to see if Romney loses the EV despite winning the PV this year if Republicans finally get behind ditching the electoral college, either through a constitutional amendment or through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Electoral Projection has actually had Romney winning the PV for the good part of two months, while losing the EV by a very significant margin.

Neither is very likely, but if Romney wins the PV by >1% then he will still lose the EC. No chance whatsoever that Obama wins the PV and loses the EC, it barely qualifies as a statistical possibility.

I still don't see how Obama wins the electoral college and not the popular vote, remember he's going to rack up huge million-vote margins in California, Illinois and New York and Romney really only has Texas to rack up a big margin, and he isn't going to get more than ~1 million vote margin there. And he's already maxed out in the other red states (and they're small).

Romney is likely to improve on McCain's margin across most of the South and in the Mormon Belt.

Option 1.

At this point I think they're more likely to bring back the proposal of switching to awarding a state's EC votes by congressional district. Starting with PA, MI, etc of course.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/pennsylvania-electoral-college-plan-could-backfire-on-g-o-p/

In 2008 McCain would have had to win the popular vote 2.5% to get to 270 EV.  So I expect this year Obama could win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote by up to 2%

Yeah, but not that much...what's that going to net him +500,000 votes? Still has to make up for that 5 million vote margin out of Cali and New York...

I wanted to demonstrate this visually, because I think this may say something about 2012's EC landscape.

If McCain had won by 2.5% (assuming third party totals remain unchanged), that would make the margin 50.49 to 47.99 in favor of McCain. That's a 4.88% swing from Obama to McCain. Map:

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McCain 280, Obama 258

The lowest possible McCain EC win comes with a 2.39% victory in the PV that delivers Iowa and Colorado (with a 2.24%, McCain picks up just CO and ties 269-269*). It's interesting to note that 2.38% of the vote in 2008 was ~ 3,312,476 ballots. McCain could have won the PV by over 3.3 million votes and still lost the election (hypothetically).

[size=8.5pt]*Romney, after the redistricting, can actually win with a 2.24% margin based on 2008 numbers. That map equals to 275-263.[/size]

The winner take all EC system is supremely flawed in this regard. The President is elected to lead the entire nation, coast to coast, and should be elected as such as opposed to the EC system that allows for divisive regional strategies. We need a popular vote system.

I would love to see Romney win the popular vote and lose (the election) just like Gore did. Then maybe the electoral college would be eliminated for good.

I could see Obama pullimg off what Kerry failed to do and win OH (putting him over the top on EV) while losing the PV

Tell that to Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, and Andrew Jackson.

Actually, 1824 was the one time the Presidential election system worked exactly as the Founders had thought it would.  The Electoral College narrowed the field and Congress then chose who won the runoff when no one got a majority.  After all, Jackson did win a plurality in the Electoral College.