While Mr. Romney appeared to be doing relatively well in the South in the middle of the summer, he was just barely ahead relative to Mr. Cain in the Southern region of the country at the end of September. Thus relative to 2008, Mr. Romney was struggling in many states in this particular region. In terms of the political landscape, it makes no difference if Mr. Romney wins a particular Southern state by 17 points or 21 points. However, it is worth monitoring states where the race is a bit closer. I was monitoring Georgia throughout September, because while it never was a swing state, thing looked a bit closer than they should be of course, Mr. McCain did not do nearly as well as Mr. Bush did in Georgia, but a win is a win. A few weeks ago, we had two polls from Georgia. One showed Mr. Romney winning by a landslide double digit margin, the other was much closer, but still comfortable, so together with other data, I can not only put Georgia off my radar for this election, but for the next few election cycles.
As imperfect as my model is, with the release of more data to the public over the past months, by the end of September, I saw patterns that internal pollsters were seeing earlier in the summer. While every election cycle, there are about 12 to 18 battleground states, there are usually only 5 or 6 states that are truly swing states in terms of potentially tipping the balance to one candidate or the other. By early September, it became evident that at least 7 or 8 states could call themselves swing states, now it does not take too much of a stretch to see we have about a dozen swing or at least quasi swing states.
If an election were held at the end of September, Mr. Obama would have probably won 333 to 205. Mr. Romney would have won North Carolina by less than 2 point and Mr. Obama would have won the remaining swing and quasi swing states and win the national popular vote by 2.6%. The good news for Mr. Romney was that Mr. Obama would be only 247 electoral points without the swing states. In fact, Mr. Romney was behind by less than 1 point in Colorado, Florida and Virginia. Adding these states to Mr. Romney’s total, would put him at 256. He trailed in Iowa and Ohio by less then 2 points. Winning these two tipping point states, Mr. Romney would be up to 180 already and he was within 3 point of New Hampshire and Nevada; winning these states would bring him to 292. Wisconsin and Oregon were quasi swing states and Michigan and New Mexico were close to being quasi swing states. In short, with so many states being up for grabs, it was possible for either candidate to win a significant amount of electoral points without winning the popular vote by a huge margin.