If the polls are right, Romney will win the popular vote and lose the election
If the national and state polls play are accurate Obama will win the Electoral College vote count (seen above) and yet lose the popular vote.
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Screenshot by Ryan Witt
If the current polls of the presidential race are accurate, Mitt Romney could become the Al Gore of 2012. As the entire nation discovered in the 2000 presidential race, the Electoral College is the vote that counts in determining the presidential winner, not the popular vote. Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but President George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote count. In similar fashion, Mitt Romney appears destined to win the popular vote according to the national polls, but also seems destined to lose the Electoral College vote count according to the state polls.
If the election were held today and the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of national polls held true Romney would win the popular vote by about one percentage point. Romney currently garners 47.7% support in the RCP average of seven national polls.Gallup has Romney up by seven points (52%-45%), and Rasmussen Reports has Romney up by two points (49%-47%). IBD/TIPP's tracking poll has the race tied at 46%. There has been some criticism of Gallup’s numbers, and it is unlikely that Romney is winning by that big of margin nationally. Still, the polling averages tend to be very accurate, and the average has Romney up at this point in the race.
Simply looking at those numbers one might think that Romney would be ahead in the states. However, the state polls show quite a different picture.
Eleven state polls were released yesterday, and Obama won ten of those polls. Even excluding the polls of Obama’s safe states (Washington, Minnesota, and Connecticut), Obama still won seven out of eight polls. Rasmussen Reports and Survey USA both had Obama winning the key swing state of Ohio. NBC/WSJ/Marist has Obama winning Iowa by eight points (51%-43%)and winning Wisconsin by six points (51%-45%). Public Policy Polling shows Obama up by three points in Colorado (50%-47%) and two polls show Obama up by at least three points in Michigan. The one state pollsters had Romney winning yesterday is North Carolina, which Obama can easily afford to lose. Romney needs to win at least Ohio.
This national versus state polls trend has been ongoing for weeks now since Romney surged after the first presidential debate. The national polls have consistently shown, on average, But then the state polls released on the very same day show what are apparently contradictory results. A survey of the ten key swing states has consistently shown Romney losing seven or eight of those states, which would make it impossible for Romney to get the 270 electoral votes he needs.
Many conservatives have contended that the state polls must be wrong, and that Romney must be doing better in the swing states than the polls suggests. Liberals have argued that the national polls must be off. However, at this point it may be time to consider the possibility that both sets of poll are right.
As much as pollsters are criticized, when multiple pollsters are averaged over time they tend to be very accurate. In 2008, the RCP average of polls correctly predicted the winner in 49 out of the 50 states. The one state the RCP average was only off by one percentage point off in the one state it was wrong, North Carolina. Nationally, the RCP average had Obama up by 7.6 points in 2008, and Obama actually won by 7.3 points. Based on their track record from 2008, the average of polls is more likely to be right than wrong both nationally and in the states.
So how is it possible that Romney could be up nationally and yet losing the Electoral College?
The simplest explanation is that Romney is winning by a bigger margin than Obama in the states where Romney does prevail. Almost all the states are winner-take-all, so if Obama wins Ohio by only one point in 2012 he will still get all of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. The margin of victory within each state does not matter in determining the Electoral College vote, but it does matter in determining the popular vote. If Romney wins his states, on average, by a bigger margin than Obama than Romney could very well win the popular vote while losing the election.
There is some evidence to suggest that this scenario is playing out. Despite having Romney up by seven points nationally, Gallup has Obama winning every region of the country but the South. The reason Gallup still has Romney winning is that Obama wins all of his regions, like the Midwest, by a small margin. However, Romney wins the South (according to Gallup) by over twenty points. If those kind of numbers ring true on Election Day Mitt Romney will undoubtedly win the popular vote, but likely lose the Electoral College. If misery really does love company, Al Gore may be happier man soon.
