An Analogy; baseball and Presidential race

[Nym90]

Baseball also works well as an analogy for the Electoral College.
The United States is a Federal Republic with power shared between states and the federal government.  Hence states should play a role in selecting the President.

In Baseball who wins the World Series?  the team that scores the most runs  or the team that wins the most games?  Obviously the team that wins the most games.

So in the Electoral College it is the candidate that wins the most Electoral Votes by winning many differnet states, not the candidate who gets the most popular votes, that wins the election.

Except that the individual games of the World Series are played on different days...whereas the Presidential Election is held on the same day. I would say the World Series is more like the Presidential Primaries (except that some primaries aren't winner take all). I would argue that for the primaries, it makes more sense to use delegates rather than total nationwide popular vote since the elections aren't all held the same day, thus you can't just combine them into one total...they aren't all one election, they are all seperate elections, but the Presidential Election is one contest, not 50 seperate contests.

[Nym90]

This might be carrying it off topic a bit far, but somehow I remember a Monday Night Football historic trend. It goes something like on the Monday Night game before the election, if the home team wins the incumbent always wins or maybe it's vice versa. I might have it backwards, but it's like that. Seems like I always hear them talk about it on an election year and I remember hearing about it in 2000. Of course, MNF hasn't exactly been around since Abe Lincoln, but it's an interesting statistic.

Monday, Nov. 1 is Miami Dolphins at NY Jets, BTW. I'm not even going to try to predict that one!

I know that this didn't hold in 2000, because the Green Bay Packers won at home in the MNF game the day before the election.

The one that I had heard was that if the Washington Redskins win their last game before the election, the incumbent party wins, and if they lose, the incumbent party loses....the Redskins play host to the Packers this year the week before the election.

Just one more reason for me to cheer for my beloved Packers.