Politics: The Day After the Election, Part II

As an observer of the political process, I spent the last week making a series of post about swing state polling and the electoral college.

My three take aways are marked in bold.

In polling, the perspective is "polls are generally right unless they aren't" and last night, they were generally right.

There were reasons, which I went into, as to why the polling might have been mis-reading the public but in the end the state level polling that showed a comfortable lead for the President turned out to be correct and the national level polling that showed a close race plus/minus 1% turned out to be within the margin of error and correct as the President will clear about a 2% popular vote victory.

It was thought that it was unlikely that Obama's turnout would be as strong as 2008 and that Romney's turnout would improve on McCain's. The question was whether the combination of increase on one side and decrease on the other would change the outcome.

In 2008, Obama received 69.5 million votes compared to McCain's 59.9 million.

The 2012 figure at the moment (noon Wednesday) has Obama at 60 million and Romney at 57 million. The final figures will take a few more days to tabulate.

Thus, at this point, Obama support declined a fair amount but Romney support also declined resulting in a closer race but the outcome not all that different from 2008 which raises major questions for the Republican party.

This became clear when Florida, North Carolina and Virginia stayed too close to call early in the evening. These were the most fertile ground to Romney and if he couldn't win those outright there would have been no reason to believe Romney could breakthrough in the mid-west and get to 270.

My final political take-away is that the Electoral College remains a net positive for the political process.

The popular vote differential is about 2% which is not a big difference but people will remember the electoral college differential which is politically beneficial going forward. Whether the Founding Fathers had this feature in mind, I don't know, but this "crazy" and "quirky" device reveals and amplifies the edge in support the President has in a wider range of states.