Electing President Biden? (My head hurts)

What are you trying to do? Share your headache?

Yep, thats me

No, I thought the prospect was just so bizarre, I wanted to share it.

ha! the bipolarbear'd happy for once

Why yes. Yes we do.


That portion of the 12th amendment has been superseded by the 20th amendment, which states, in relevant part:

Not much different, but it makes clear that the vice-president only acts as president until the house of representatives gets its act together and chooses a president (that was somewhat unclear under the 12th amendment).

Thanks for the clarification, Joe. So no four years of President Biden, then, in any case?

Jesus! Please tell me you made all that up.

Actually, Biden looks way more presidential (whatever that is) than the others, not that he represents my viewpoint. He just seems so adult, you know?

Only if it takes the house of representatives four years to break its deadlock and elect a president.

Yeah, well....
a) We got ours before all the other kids did, and folks still had to get around by horses and stuff.
b) Ya'll had our bad example to learn from.

Nyah!!!

Yeah but nobody said you had to stick with your example for the rest of eternity ... other people just changed the parts of their systems that didnt work anymore!

Just change it?

Are you friggin kidding me?

C'mon, after the past eight years don't you understand that we love our current system and apparently quite a few want to keep it the same? You better be careful or we'll... we'll...
um, wait, I don't think we have any hungarian food items that we can name change and claim as our own. (Patriot Goulash, anyone?)

But it has worked. You posted a hypothetical, not a real-world example of when the system actually broke down.


And the system has been revised when it was unworkable, such as electing President and Vice President seperately.

Don't you remember "freedom fries?" LOL

OK, this is related - so I'm just going to crosspost this sequence of posts from the Polls etc thread. Plus, that'll line the maps up nicely underneath each other. (I did change/add some wording here and there.)

______________________________________________

OK, so both pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com not only keep track of all the polls that come out for every state, but also compute a trendline or projection on the basis of those polls.

I wanted to draw the current electoral map on the basis of the data on those two sites. Specifically, to draw the map according to different thresholds for what to consider a toss-up state.

If nothing else, it's a good opportunity to practice the Google Charts thing Craven presented on a more advanced scale. (I've used the web tools he linked in to make simple pie and bar charts, but want to now try out following the instructions in the Google Chart developer's guide on making maps.

OK. So coloured in on the following map are all the states where both pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com currently give one of the two parties an advantage of at least 10%. These are, like, rock-solid safe states (note that Iowa, which went for Bush in '04, is already in there for the Dems!):





That's a very red looking map, but in fact it's 160 Electoral Votes for the Dems and 128 for the Republicans. You need 270 to win, of course.

OK, let's tighten it up a notch. States that both sites have one or the other candidate ahead in by at least 7%:





North Dakota, Georgia and Louisiana make it into the Republican camp; Oregon and Maine onto the Democratic side. That's 171 Electoral Votes for the Dems and 155 for the Republicans.

Both still far removed from 270, then. But all the states not colored in now are arguably in play: what's a 7% gap? One candidate needs to convince 3,5% of the voters to switch parties.

Tighten it up another notch: states where both sites have one of the candidates ahead by at least 5%:





That puts Washington and New Jersey in Obama's column, making for 197 Electoral Votes for the Dems and still 155 for the Republicans.

Another notch to states where both sites have one of the candidates ahead by at least 3%:





That puts Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin in Obama's column and West-Virginia in McCain's, making for 239 Electoral Votes for the Dems and 160 for the Republicans.

Still 31 short for Obama, and 110 short for McCain. Looking ever better for Obama.

Are you feeling the suspense?

States where both sites have one of the candidates ahead by at least 2%:



That puts Pennsylvania and Colorado in Obama's column and Montana, Missouri and North-Carolina in McCain's, making for 269 Electoral Votes for the Dems and 189 for the Republicans.

This of course would put Obama on the edge of being elected -- except that 269 Electoral Votes makes for a very tortured post-elections process.

So basically, what Obama's painless election comes down to is getting at least one of the states left undivided on this map as well.

And there's the rub.

Which of the remaining states are currently most promising?

In Florida and Indiana, both pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com give McCain the advantage, if with a narrow advantage. In IN, McCain leads by 2,5% according to pollster and 1,7% according to fivethirtyeight. In Florida, he's given the edge by 3,3% and 0,6% respectively.

So that leaves New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and Nevada. In all these states, fivethirtyeight.com currently accords the advantage to Obama. But pollster.com disagrees: it currently gives the edge to McCain in every one of them.

On balance, McCain gets Ohio and Nevada, and Obama gets Virginia and New Hampshire:



Virginia actually looks better than NH right now. The latest two polls out of NH both have McCain with a 2-3 point lead there, and one of them is the locally respected UNH poll. The four last polls from Virginia on the other hand have split, two with Obama comfortably ahead (by 6 and 8 points) and two with McCain narrowly in front (by 2 points). The pollsters showing Obama ahead also have a little more entrenched a reputation (ABC/WaPo and Survey USA) than the two with McCain ahead (Rasmussen and ARG). But obviously, it's still pretty much a coin's toss.

And of course, if the state that's Obama's best chance of getting 269+1 is down to a coin's toss, that is starting to make that other thread about the complicated consequences of a 269-269 result in the Electoral College - [nimh: i.e., this one] uncomfortably topical.

nimh, Good show! Now the big q: how recent are those poll numbers?

Both sites base their trendline/projection on all available polls. But of course that does mean that the more polls there are available for a state the more up-to-date the rating is. Luckily, all the contested states are very intensively polled at the moment; the states for which there are few current data available are generally states that are very safely Republican or Democrat anyway.