06 November 2012, 02:35 PM IST
Ohio will decide the next President of the United States. Polling in the US begins 6pm Tuesday (Indian time). The result, barring a tie and legal complications, will be known Wednesday morning. President Barack Obama faces a head wind but will probably just beat Mitt Romney in one of the tightest elections in American history.
Two months ago, in an edit page piece in The Times of India, I'd predicted a narrow victory for Obama. Race and gender, I'd written, will determine the outcome. How do the numbers stack up now? As Americans get ready to vote, Obama has 201 firm electoral college votes to his name against Mitt Romney's 191.
The states in Obama's corner are California (55 electoral college votes), Washington (12), Illinois (20), New York (29), Rhode Island (4), Delaware (3), Maryland (10), Hawaii (4), DC (3), Vermont (3), Massachusetts (11), Connecticut (7), Maine (3), New Jersey (14), New Mexico (5), Maine CD2 (1), Minnesota (10) and Oregon (7). That totals 201 secure electoral college votes. The winning total is 270. Where will Obama get the other 69 he needs to win?
He'll probably get 62 from these six toss-up states where he's currently leading opinion polls by between 2.5% and 5%: Michigan (16), Wisconsin (10), New Hamphsire (4), Iowa (6), Nevada (6) and Pennsylvania (20).
That takes him to 263 – just 7 electoral college votes short of the winning total. This means he has to win just 1 of these 3 close toss-up states – Ohio (18), Virginia (13) and Colorado (9). In contrast, Romney has to win all 3 to beat Obama.
Ohio, with its closed factories and job losses, is Obama's best bet and will take him to 281. The problem is that Ohio is fickle. It's often been the Democrats' heartbreak state, letting them down at crucial times.
Obama was leading Ohio by 2.9% in the latest opinion polls as of Monday afternoon (US time) but that's within the polls' error margin of 3%. The importance of Ohio is underlined by the fact that the Obama and Romney campaigns have spent a combined $189 million (over Rs1,000 crore) there on election ads, mainly on TV, more than in any other US state.
Ohio has picked the winner in the last 11 US presidential elections going back to 1968. Of these it's chosen Republican presidents 7 times and Democrat presidents just 4 times. Obama won Ohio comfortably in 2008. This time the race is a lot closer. Colorado and Virginia, both conservative states, could swing towards Romney at the last moment, leaving Ohio a must-win for Obama if he has to cross 270.
As I wrote two months ago in The Times of India, African-Americans are likely to again vote overwhelmingly (95%) for Obama. But will they turn out in the large numbers they did in 2008? Unlikely.
Latinos, Hispanics and Asians are set to vote for Obama as well (around 67%) but the white male vote – America's biggest demographic – is solidly behind Romney. White women are split evenly between Obama and Romney. Across races Obama commands a majority with women voters.
The US remains a racially divided society. Overt racism is rare but even those white voters who saw Obama as a messiah after the economic meltdown following the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008 have been disappointed in him.
Many conservatives talk privately of a "blacklash" against Obama. His Kenyan roots and Muslim middle name are fodder for white neo-cons and the religious right wing of the Republican party.
Notwithstanding all these handicaps, despite the US economy limping along at 2% a year and unemployment at 7.9%, Obama will probably just make it across the finish line.
Romney yesterday furiously attacked Democrat bastions in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a last-ditch effort to breach Obama's electoral college firewall. But unless dozens of pollsters have got their math all wrong, it's Obama's race to win.
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