Victory Requirements

Amidst the flurry of spinning the results from North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, and Wisconsin last week, a few political strategists have been playing numbers games in trying to determine how either Mr. Obama retains the White House or Mr. Romney wins.

This far out, any analysis is pretty much useless. The best you can do is look back at 2008 and extrapolate based on current trends. From everywhere that I can find, it is expected that Mr. Obama will not do as well as he did in 2008 and that he will likely lose a few states that he won in 2008. I see no problem with this analysis and the question is how much he can lose and still hold on to the White House.

Two states that Mr. Obama will almost certainly lose that he won are North Carolina and Indiana. Mr. Obama won North Carolina by a margin of only 0.33% (14,200 votes) and Indiana by a margin of 1.03% (28,400 votes). These would require a switch of just 7,100 and 14,200 votes in each of those states and that seems quite likely at this point.

Florida comes next. Mr. Obama's margin of victory was 2.82% (236,450 votes out of 8.3 million cast) and a switch of just under 120,000 votes will swing the state. That is increasingly likely as Florida has tightened its voting laws and the poor economy has caused a number of potential snow bird votes from New York to lose their Florida homes and stay in New York (where Mr. Obama will win easily).

Ohio is the last state that Mr. Obama won with less than a 5% margin. He won Ohio with a 4.59% margin (262,000 votes). Ohio is still showing loyalty to Mr. Obama in the early polls. His strength will remain strong in the cities just as he will be pummeled in the rural areas. The make or break area will likely be in the southeastern corner of the state. A traditionally Democratic region (poor, blue collar) but that has been hit hard by the economic downturn and could go either way.

Virginia is the last state that Mr. Obama can lose and still retain the White House. Thanks to the strength of the Northern Virginia suburbs of DC, Mr. Obama won Virginia by a margin of 6.30% (234,500 votes). He'll still get very good returns in that region of the state, but if he doesn't retain the numbers he got from Richmond and the areas around Norfolk, Virginia will swing red again.

The tipping point state is Colorado. In the scenario painted so far, Mr. Obama would win 272-266. This means that if he loses any other state (other than the 3-pointers of Delaware, Vermont, or DC), he loses the election. Colorado was the next closest margin at 8.95% (215,000 votes). Iowa and New Hampshire are also obvious targets to turn as the margins in those states were 9.53% (146,500 votes) and 9.61% (68,300 votes) respectively.

Every state is different and while there might be a wild swing in one state against Mr. Obama, another state might push his margin of victory even higher than in 2008. However, the immediate take away is that Mr. Obama must limit his losses to less than a 4.5% switch across the board. If he does that, he'll win a second term. If he does worse than that, he will lose.