It’s Still Obama’s Election

Despite all the buzz over Sarah Palin and the polls showing a dead heat or even a slight McCain advantage, Obama is still well ahead in the only polls that actually matter – so much ahead that it’s hard to see how McCain can pull out a victory.

In the US system, voters don’t directly elect Presidents. Although voters cast their ballots marked for a candidate, in fact they’re voting for a slate of delegates to the Electoral College. (The American system, after all, was set up by men who didn’t trust ordinary voters to know what was good for them, so Presidential and originally Senate elections were designed to be indirect.) These days, those delegates are pledged to a specific candidate.

It’s those Electoral College delegates who actually choose the President, several weeks after the early November national election. The magic number is 270 – if you get the votes of 270 electoral college delegates (a bare majority of the total), you become President.

And Obama still has a big advantage in likely numbers of electoral college delegates, even using the same polls that show him lagging in the popular vote.

How is this possible? Because each of the fifty US states gets to decide how to allocate its electoral college delegation. Each state gets the same number of delegates as it has members of Congress – two Senators plus however many Representatives the state has, which is based on population. (The smallest number of delegates a state can have is thus three, for its two senators and at least one representative. Alaska, Palin’s home state, has three.) 48 of the states have a winner-take-all system, so a candidate who (barely) wins enough states can triumph over one who wins in several states by huge margins but doesn’t carry enough of the states. That’s what happened to Al Gore in 2000, who won the popular vote by a margin of several hundred thousand – and lost the Presidency.

So national polls aren’t very useful. Instead, it’s the state-by-state polls that matter. And adding up the numbers of Electoral College votes in states that are currently tilting noticeably to one candidate or the other shows a strong Obama advantage of about 225 Electoral College votes for Obama, versus 175 for McCain. The rest are in states currently too close to call.

Can McCain still win? Yes, but to do so, he has to carry many more of the currently undecided states than Obama does. Anything is possible in American elections – but the safe money now is on Obama. [Ann]

● Not all the policies proposed by Obama and McCain are sound. Foreign Policy lists 20 terrible policy proposals suggested by McCain and Obama:

Obama's Top 10 worst ideas

McCain's Top 10 worst ideas

● Reminder: Catch Ann tomorrow night (11th September) at 10.30 pm on Channel 8 FOCUS program. Ann will give her take on the upcominig US Presidential Election.