Mitt Romney arrived for lunch at the White House on Nov. 29.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mitt Romney arrived for lunch at the White House on Nov. 29.
WASHINGTON — Not too long ago, political analysts assumed the Republicans had a clear advantage in the Electoral College, the system according to which each state, based on population, is given electors that in almost all cases are awarded on a winner-take-all basis, determining who will be the president of the United States. Today, it’s the Democrats who have the edge.
Page Two
Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.
Start by looking at the past seven presidential elections, three won by Republicans, four by Democrats. Then put most states that went for one party in five of these seven elections into the red column for Republican, blue for Democrat and purple or toss-up for the others.
Three are caveats: North Carolina and Virginia voted Republican until recently; the trends, however, are so pronounced that they are more purple than red. Conversely, West Virginia voted Democratic in three of these contests, but has moved safely into the red ranks.
BLUE: The District of Columbia and 20 states, mainly on the coasts and in the progressive upper Midwest, with 256 electoral votes, are the Democrats’ base.
RED: 23 states, with 188 electoral votes, including much of the South, the Plains and Rocky Mountains states, are reliably Republican.
There are seven purple states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire — with 94 electoral votes.
The upshot: In any normal election cycle, the Republicans have to win Florida and Ohio and at least three of the other five. Or they have to turn around some blue states, such as Pennsylvania and Iowa.
In the my latest Left From Washington, I write about how some Republicans
in states where Republicans control the state government are considering changing how those states assign their electoral votes, instead of the winner-take-all system used in most states, they would emulate Maine and Nebraska, where some of the state’s electoral votes are awarded based on which presidential candidate carried a district.
As I write:
They see a possible test case in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Obama won the popular vote by more than five percentage points, rolling up huge margins in Philadelphia and its suburbs and in Pittsburgh. Mr. Romney, however, carried 13 of the 18 congressional districts. If this new system were in effect, the Republicans would have gotten 13 of the state’s 20 electoral votes while getting trounced in the popular vote. If this occurred in mainly Republican states, it would erase the Democrats’ Electoral College advantage.
Politics do shift. In 1988, the Republicans won California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, Maryland and Vermont; all now are considered safely part of the blue base.