The Old College Try: Republican-Style
In the June 2003 Crystal Ball, we manipulated the Electoral College to find a way for Democrats to compete, and potentially win, in November 2004. In this month’s Crystal Ball musing, we turn the tables. How should George W. Bush approach his old friend, the Electoral College? The president has not forgotten that the College – and the Supreme Court – handed him the Oval Office, despite a popular vote deficit of almost 540,000 votes. And to be sure, Bush, Karl Rove and company are carefully examining every potential combination of states to deliver a second term, with or without a popular plurality. The White House does not share its calculations with us, alas, but the Crystal Ball will attempt to conjure up the best formula for a Bush re-election strategy. With political science as our training, it will surprise few readers that we’ll approach this task using a statistical twist. The easy, and somewhat misleading, way to accomplish our goal would be simply to look at the 2000 election numbers to see where Bush was strong, weak, and on the margin. Naturally, that has to a part of the process, but it ignores the fact that all states evolve