Among the many, many things that bother me has to be the ubiquity of national tracking polls for the US presidential election. They're everywhere. RealClearPolitics----BAM, top-right, first numbers you see. Obama plus four! Woo! And the cable news networks, my god the cable news networks----I don't even know where to begin.

All of this obsession with how the candidates are faring nationally would be somewhat informative if we decided our presidential elections by whoever received the most votes. However, as anyone who graduated eighth grade knows, that's not what we do. That's never been what we do. Barring a constitutional amendment, it's not going to be what we do. Here in the United States, we have the electoral college, making the "popular vote"----and the estimates/predictions of it a la national polling data----next to meaningless.

The strange national obsession with the popular vote that persists in spite of this fact is encouraged by the all-too-common equivocations about popular voting and voting rights. During the recent Florida/Democratic nomination/Rules & Bylaws Committee shitshow, the Clinton campaign had a field day with the "one person, one vote" mantra,  and Senator Clinton made frequent mention of her (alleged) lead in the popular vote before alluding to the Bush victory in 2000:

Right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner. The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear. If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people is not realized and our democracy is diminished.

Complaining about G. Dubs's election in 2000 has become a favorite pastime among Democrats, but the failure to distinguish between (legitimate) claims about vote suppression, voting irregularities, and the recount in Florida, and (stupid) comments about how Gore won more votes nationally, with the implication that therefore he ought to be president, has always marred these discussions.

So anyway, moving from that unnecessary and (I'm slowly realizing) off-topic preface out of the way, I give to you noble voyagers of the blogosphere (blogonauts?) a somewhat more meaningful measure of the respective chances of Obama and McCain in the upcoming presidential election... By taking state-by-state polling data, it is possible to estimate the probability of a particular candidate winning any particular state. By combining those probabilities, you can then estimate the probability of a particular candidate winning the 270 electoral votes necessary to capture the presidency.

I can go more into the precise methodology later if anyone out there wants to know, but for now, the results? Really fucking close:


Probability of Electoral Victory

Obama----52.9%

McCain----44.7%

Tie----2.4%


Median Electoral Vote Total

Obama:     270

McCain:     268

So, as of June 11, the polling data shows an election that is about as close as possible, regardless of whatever numbers happen to be out there nationally. Of course, these numbers will change markedly over the next five months, but to gauge how my candidate is doing, I'll take this over some lame-ass national poll any day.