The Results

Okay, it's time to shake off the gravitas of that last post and crack a little smile.

It appears the final results are going to be 365-173 with NC going to Obama, MO to McCain, and Obama picking up 1 of the 5 Electoral votes from NE.

So that's 10 votes shy of the 375 number designated as a landslide by 538.com. Olbermann dubbed a neo-landslide, which I think is ridiculous. You don't have to pump up Obama's results, Keith. 365 will stand for itself.

Anyways, this summer I received this map of Battleground States in a video emailed to me from David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager:


This map shows the 17 swing states that will decide the election. Using this as the starting point, this means that 200 Electoral were Safe Dem, and 142 were Safe Rep. That's a pretty big advantage to start from in the battleground states.

In fact, for Obama to get to 270 from there, he only needed PA (21) CO (9) FL (27) and VA (13).Or if you assume that IA, WI, MI and NH were also safe, that puts him at 238, needing only 32.

Or putting it another way, Obama ended up with 365. The five swing states that were noted by CNN (IN, OH, PA, VA and FL) add up to 92. Barack Obama would still be the 44th President even if he had lost all five key states.

But back to the Obama Battleground Map. Those 17 states were worth 196. 164 went blue. 32 red. And the ones that went red were a stretch to put on the battleground in the first place, except for Missouri: GA, MT and ND. Bush outperformed Kerry by 58%, 60%, and 64% respectively.

If you're scoring at home the math is off by one. That's because Obama is projected to get 1 of NE's 5 votes, which wasn't considered a battleground by O's campaign.

So technically, here's the breakdown:

Obama
Safe D: 200
Battle: 164
Safe R: 1
Total: 365

McCain
Safe R: 142
Battle: 32
Safe R: -1
Total: 173


As for the states that I specifically wanted to be blue, I got Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Viriginia. A narrow miss in Missouri and not even close in West Virginia. Not too bad.

And my prediction of 318-220 wasn't terrible. I missed three states and the 1 vote from Nebraska. I gave Indiana , Ohio, and North Carolina to McCain. The actual results were 50-49, 51-47, and 50-49, for Obama. Notably, I didn't project any states for Obama that went to McCain.

As for the pundits, the winner was:

Alan Abramowitz, Emory University political scientist
Electoral College: Obama 361 McCain 177

The loser was:

Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard editor
Electoral College: Obama 252 McCain 286

As for fivethirtyeight.com, my trusted source for all my electoral projections...

Their model picked the states and came up with 353 for Obama, off by the 11 votes of Indiana and the 1 in Nebraska. When their model averaged the possibilities, it arrived at 348.6 and cited that there was a 59% chance that NC would go to Obama. We had heard the Obama ground game would be the difference in many states, and it seems that could be the explanation why Indiana went blue, contrary to the polling model.

Still, I think they nailed it.

Their popular vote prediction:
52.3 percent for Obama
46.2 percent for McCain

Current totals according to Wikipedia:
52.5 percent for Obama
46.2 percent for McCain

Obama became the first Democrat to get 50% of the vote since Jimmy Carter in '76, trumping Bill Clinton a.k.a. the first black president.

And Obama got the most votes ever, though that record will likely be broken as our population keeps increasing.

And voter turnout was 64% of eligible citizens. A previous estimate was that only 70% of elgibile citizens are registered to vote. This was the highest turnout rate since 1908.

This concludes Hoagie Central's 2008 election coverage. Winning was the easy part. Governing will be tough. And that's the one that counts.