McCain's math

Remember in 2006, when polls were showing the Democrats would likely pick up a bunch of seats, but Karl Rove said he had "the math" to show Republicans would prevail? In hindsight, his math was about as accurate as Superman's Super Math. Apparently Rove has learned from that experience, and now it's McCain's turn to have "the math":

“Those polls have consistently shown me much farther behind than we actually are,” Mr McCain said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “We’re doing fine. We have closed [the gap] in the last week. We continue to close this next week. You’re going to be up very, very late on election night.” ....

But in an analysis of the state of the race on Fox News, Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s election victories, said Mr Obama now had his biggest lead of the campaign, and was ahead in states with 317 electoral votes, compared with 157 votes for Mr McCain and 270 needed to win the presidency.

According to Mr Rove, Mr Obama was set to capture Ohio, Indiana, Colorado and Virginia. “In order for McCain to win, he’s got a very steep hill to climb,” he said indicating it would be extremely difficult for the Republican to turn round a national deficit of more than six points.

A McCain presidency is still possible, of course — but so is a snowfall in June. I don't have "the math," but here's some math to ponder. Based on state-by-state polls, Electoral Vote puts the current electoral college standings as Obama 375, McCain 157. It also shows that McCain is in a tough spot, behind in some must-win states. Unless he takes Pennsylvania, which looks unlikely, McCain needs Virginia to win; without it, even taking Florida and Ohio is unlikely to put him over the top. (He'd have to take every other state that's within the margin of error, and take Colorado, where Obama has been pretty consistently ahead.) And that means we may get to go to bed early after all, because Virginia's polls close at 7 pm Eastern time.

This doesn't mean we can get complacent, of course. While Obama currently has a 6% lead in Virginia, that state isn't normal Democratic territory, so it's hard to believe it could be anything but close. If McCain takes Virginia, then get-out-the-vote efforts in traditional swing states like Ohio and Florida become vitally important, and it's conceivable that final victory could hinge on smaller states like Indiana and Missouri. If you have some spare time and a pocket calculator, you might want to run through some of these scenarios, just for fun.