The Electoral College Vote

The presidential election boils down to three questions:

1. Can Romney win every southern state? I think the answer to that question is yes. The trickiest state for Romney is probably Virginia. North Carolina and Florida seem settled in his favor (at least to me).

2. Can Romney win Colorado and New Hampshire? I think Colorado is done. I think he wins New Hampshire by a point.

3. Can Romney poach two of the three Midwestern "firewall states" from Obama? Which is to say: Can Romney win Iowa and Wisconsin? I think he wins both by a slim (but no recount) margin.

Which means he wins the election.

We'll see. I think it's possible that Romney also wins Ohio and Pennsylvania, comes very close in Minnesota and Michigan and runs surprisingly well in Oregon, Illinois and New Mexico. But that presumes a more Republican-leaning electorate than most of the state polls are anticipating.

One thing I do know is that the early exit polls will skew Democratic and that viewers wiil be well-advised to disregard much of what they hear about "early exits." The number to watch is President Obama's percentage of the white vote nationally. If it's near 40%, then he probably wins the Electoral College and the popular vote. If it's in the 36-37% range, Romney will be our next president. In between, obviously, things get dicey.

Whatever happens, it is going to be a very late night.

Note: Because I am working off an I-Pad, I can't figure out how to post my map to Blogger. Ordinarily I would take a screen shot of the map and post it that way, but....failure. Anyway, you can access the map by going to @41jellis on Twitter.