Looking at the race for the Presidency in Virginia by the numbers it's actually a pretty straight forward path to victory for Barack Obama- of course the execution is the hard part.
If blacks make up 20% of the electorate in the state as they make up 20% of the population, and Obama gets 90% of their votes he has 18%.
Assuming that another 5% of the electorate is other nonwhite voters, such as Asians and Hispanics, who tend to vote Democratic. If he gets 60% of those votes it's another 3%, pushing him up to 21%.
That leaves the white population at 75%, and Obama needing another 29% of the vote to get to 50%. If he gets 39% support from white voters he's there.
Right now John McCain leads 55-36 with white voters in the state so Obama would only need to get a third of undecided white voters to get to that magic 39%.
He'd probably do it if the election was today- but we've got another ten weeks left and who knows what will happen between now and November.
Another variable is newly registered voters. Over 200,000 new voters have registered in VA since January of this year. From news reports 2/3 of these new voters are under the age of 35. That is a large block of voters most of whom seem to fall within the pro-Obama demographic. If 80% of these new voters show up that by itself may be enough to give Obama a +2% boost in his numbers.
ReplyDeletei think the key here is to denote that the candidate with the most outs in this case is likely to win such a close race.
ReplyDeletefirst there are i believe 98 electoral votes that can be characterized as toss ups from states like: nevada, new mexico, colorado,ohio, virginia, north carolina and florida. what is interesting to remember is out of these 98 electoral votes obama needs only 15 for 270. Mccain may have a tough day on Nov 4?
im hoping Tom Jenson would agree?
Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Obama by 35 points in the Kentucky primary, the Illinois senator stood in Iowa — the site of his first victory in January — to celebrate the milestone marked by his clinching the majority of pledged delegates at stake in the Democratic nomination.
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Cindy
North Carolina Drug Addiction
Virginia is a state that has gone red every election since 1962, but for whatever reason the Democrats own a 6% party id edge?
ReplyDeleteWhy do you guys not use set party id's for your polls like the best pollsters use. You randomly call a bunch of voters [majority Democrats] and publish the results as they are....
Your two Ohio polls from June and July were hilarious and ridiculous!
continuetospread the word, obviously you do not know much about the south. There are more registered Dems than Reps in many parts of the South owing to the legacy of the mid-20th century when the south was solid Dem. Even to this day many long established "red states" have much larger numbers of registered Dems than Reps. Why don't you go look over at the North Carolina Board of Elections web page and look at his historical archive of registration statisitics, and oh NC has not gone Dem since 1976!
ReplyDeleteOr Arkansas. The dems have a gigantic Party-ID advantage, and the state legislature IS solidly democratic. Nevertheless the states votes Republican on a presidential level (unless a Clinton is the democratic nominee). On the other hand the dems DON´T have a big PartyID-advantage in Maine. Nevertheless they won big the last years.
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