Poll: Obama has tenuous Electoral College lead
Analysis by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Arkansas and Arizona are moving from the tossup into the red column. South Dakota and, significantly, Florida, are now being looked at as too close to call.
This is the rendering of Zogby International, which has presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama with leads in states that would give him 273 electoral votes in November, and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain with leads in states that would give him 146 votes, with the polling in states with the remaining 119 votes, including Virginia, considered too close to call at this time.
Virginia is among those in the too-close-to-call category, even as the latest Zogby poll has Obama with a 44 percent-to-39 percent lead over McCain in the Commonwealth.
North Carolina and South Carolina are also listed as too close to call, with Obama ahead 47 percent-to-38 percent in North Carolina and by a razor-thin 42 percent-to-41 percent margin in South Carolina.
The lead for McCain in tossup Florida is 43 percent-to-39 percent.
“Seniors and whites provide McCain a cushion over Obama. However, no one should count votes here too soon,” pollster John Zogby said by way of explanation of the too-close-to-call designation for Florida.
Even as Zogby has Obama with a strong working margin overall, that same warning about counting votes too soon applies across the board as well.
“For the time being, Obama maintains the edge and has the strength of a majority of electoral votes. His triumphant foreign trip allows him to continue to define this race. But too many of these states are close and a sizable number are undecided or choosing a third party candidate. So there is a lot of fluidity,” Zogby said.
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The real issue is not how well Obama or McCain might do in the closely divided battleground states, but that we shouldn’t have battleground states and spectator states in the first place. Every vote in every state should be politically relevant in a presidential election. And, every vote should be equal. We should have a national popular vote for President in which the White House goes to the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral vote — that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Because of state-by-state enacted rules for winner-take-all awarding of their electoral votes, recent candidates with limited funds have concentrated their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. Two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people have been merely spectators to the presidential election.
Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.
The National Popular Vote bill has been approved by 20 legislative chambers (one house in Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Washington, and two houses in Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont). It has been enacted into law in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These states have 50 (19%) of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring this legislation into effect.
See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
I agree that we need to look more closely at this.
One issue that comes to mind for me. Resources are scarce regardless of what kind of system we have in place. I wonder if we wouldn’t end up seeing a shift of resources from battleground states to safe states so that campaigns could run up the margins needed to get a popular-vote win. Just a thought …