I had too much free time the other day, so I did some probability calculations based on RCP's electoral data. If you're not a nerd, skip to the last paragraph. To keep things simple, I assumed all of the Obama states will certainly vote for Obama, all of the Romney states will certainly vote for Romney, and all of the "Toss Up" states are 50/50. So, Obama has 221, Romney has 170, and the remaining twelve states are uncertain. I started by listing the numbers 0 to 2^12-1, or 4,095, in column A. In column B, I converted column A into binary. Column C looked at just the first digit of column B, column N looked at just the last digit of column B, and columns C through M were devoted to the 10 middle digits of column B. Column O multiplied column C by 11 (Arizona's electors), multiplied column D by 9 (Colorado's electors), etc., added all 12 products together, and yielded 1 if that sum was greater than 48 (Obama needs at least 49 of those uncertain electors to win) and 0 otherwise. Then, I added up all 4,095 values in column O, and multiplied the sum by 100/4096. This yielded an 84.2529296875% chance that Obama would be re-elected if the election were held today. So, things are currently looking good for the president. Any thoughts on where we'll go from here?
Impossible to tell this early in the game. My personal prediction is that it will more or less be decided on Nov. 2, the day the last jobs report before the election comes out. Like it or not, the economy is the big issue of this election. Positive job numbers mean almost guaranteed reelection. Negative ones mean almost guaranteed failure.
