Obama Takes The States. This Election Means Obama Wins in 2012.

Obama got 365 electoral votes. McCain got 162. The last time an incumbent only got one term, it was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter got a handy 297 electoral votes vs. Gerald Ford’s 240. While Obama’s 365 isn’t quite the 489 electoral vote win Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1980, it’s still prodigious. And Obama is no Jimmy Carter. And whoever the Republicans run, it stands to reason it ain’t gonna be a Ronald Reagan.

What that means is that Obama is going to be our president for the next 8 years. Almost guaranteed. Republicans stand a much better chance of making gains in the house and senate in 2010 and 2014, and possibly 2012, given the lessons of history. But the presidency? In 2012? At this point, if you look at the changing Demographics of the country, the long term doesn’t look great for the Republicans. Here’s how Jimmy Carter won in 1976:

The 1976 Electoral Map. It Don't Look Like That Now.

Versus how Bill Clinton won in 1992:

Here's the 1992 Electoral Map. See anything different about how Clinton won?

However, it’s not the end of the Republicans or conservatives as many on the left are crowing. Here’s two interesting maps that break out the counties by the level of Democratic and Republican votes:

It's not red and blue states, people. The states are purple. It doesn't make much to make the difference.

Compare that to the same map for 2004, where Bush won handily:

The Purple State Map for 2004. See what I'm talking about?

A stark county-by-county map of election returns for 2008. Notice something about rural areas?

Here’s the same map from 2004:

The 2004 county-by-county map. Doesn't seem nearly so stark, when you break it out by district, does it?

What does it mean? It means that demographics are shifting, but not so much that there isn’t going to be a Republican president again in 8 to 12 years. It certainly doesn’t suggest there will be permanent Democrat majorities in the house and senate, although many on the left seem to expect that.

But the maps do indicate that Democrats have a solid electoral strategy, and they may be able to play it often and better in the future. They may be able to enjoy 16 years in the Whitehouse before the Republicans find a way to respond. If then. Urban areas, which almost always go blue, are expanding in the south and west, and it shows in the election returns. And, if you trace Reagan through Obama, you see that big electoral prizes like California used to be able to go Republican and, while there’s still a lot of red in California, it’s not enough to overcome the heavy democrat voting in dense urban areas.

As always seems to be the case, central planning is going to be our undoing.

But the maps alone don’t guarantee an Obama victory in 2012. They just say, “Sure. It’s doable.”

It’s history that says Obama will in in 2012. It’s tough to unseat the incumbent party after one term. Almost never happens. Add to that historical challenge the fact of Obama’s charisma and eloquence, and the distinct electoral majority he managed to achieve, and any Republican running against him in 2012 is on a suicide mission. They better have something really unique, a really untried and different strategy–cough, cough, Ron Paul–or they might as well forget it. Mike Huckabee? Otherwise known as McCain dressed in a church?

The conclusion is foregone.

The winner of the US presidential election is not always the candidate who wins the popular vote – the path to victory is to win a majority in the electoral college.

Each state has a certain number of electors, who elect the president – big states have more of them than little states – and the trick is to win enough states to stack up 270 electors’ votes.

See the very cool interactive maps, and the rest of the story here.

Can Senator Obama change this?

Author’s note: The following post admittedly uses data from a partisan organization. It’s intent is to highlight historical data to provide context for a current event. Your writer found some of the researchers’ conclusions to be simplistic and narrow, particularly in their lack of accounting for shocks to political culture during and between election years.

Barack Obama’s coalition of young, black and independent-leaning voters might not be enough to significantly change the electoral map as it has stood the last several election cycles, according to a conservative think tank. The American Enterprise Institute’s John Fortier notes that while states have switched which party they give their electoral votes over the long-term, they are less affected by short-term changes and follow the national popular vote plus or minus the “handicap” one party has on another. He argues that if states largely follow the national vote then political differences between states are less of a factor, producing more measured change than commonly believed:

Imagine a state that leans 10 percentage points toward a Republican when the national popular vote is 50-50. If a Democrat wins the national vote by 15 points, he or she will likely win that state by 5 points. If a Republican wins the national vote by 10 points, he or she will win the state by 20 points.

Mr Fortier admits there have been exceptions to America’s relative political stability, including the Republican Presidential blowouts in 1972 and 1984 and the volatility of the south before the 1980s.

Can Obama change U.S. political map? – [Politico editorial]

With the U.S. Presidential election just one year from today, I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on some of the strangeness in our electoral past. Given the Hobson’s choice (in my view at least) in 2004 and the 2000 voting controversy, one would be forgiven for thinking that it is our recent past which has produced the most strange presidential elections.

In fact, the 2000 election was the fourth time that a candidate became president without receiving a plurality of the popular vote. This also happened in the elections of 1876 and 1888, and in the election of 1824, John Quincy Adams received a plurality in neither the popular nor the electoral vote. Adams was selected president by a vote in the House of Representatives.

But my vote for the most strange presidential election in history must go to the election of 1872…

Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, sullied by a series of corruption scandals and the general incompetence of his administration, nevertheless won the Republican nomination. 

But a dissatisfied faction of the Republican party formed the new Liberal Republican Party. Charles Francis Adams, both son and grandson of former presidents, lost the nomination of this new party to New York Tribune editor, Horace Greeley.

Greeley, a onetime Grant supporter, was a social idealist whose frumpy appearance, eccentric habits and odd mannerisms made him an object of ridicule.

In his editorial career, Greeley insisted that the word “news” was plural. He once cabled a Tribune reporter: “ARE THERE ANY NEWS?” The employee cabled back: “NOT A NEW”. Yet Greeley won the nomination of the Liberal Republican Party against Adams with Benjamin Gratz Brown as his running mate. Brown did not help the campaign much, drinking heavily throughout and making a series of gaffes during summer – such as trying to cook a watermelon at a public picnic.

The Democrats saw no viable alternative. Incredibly, they also nominated the Greeley/Brown ticket. This seemed to open a floodgate of minor contenders such as free-thinking suffragette, Victoria Woodhull (although she herself couldn’t vote at the time), her running mate and former slave, Frederick Douglass, Bourbon Democrat Charles O’Conor and the Prohibition Party’s James Black.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was millionaire George Francis Train. Train, an eccentric shipping magnate and world traveler was supposedly one of the inspirations for Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (though Train’s trip only took 67 days).

Train ran as an independent and promised to make himself dictator if elected. He also charged admission fees to his speeches and became the only candidate to turn a profit from his candidacy. His showing in the polls was negligible, unsurprisingly, as was the Woodhull/Douglass ticket’s.

Greeley, reeling from public ridicule and personal grief (his wife wife had died on October 30th), was crushed by Grant in the polls and also lost his editorial position at the New York Tribune. Greeley’s mental and physical health swiftly declined and he died only three weeks after the election – before the electoral votes were cast. Consequently, the few electoral votes Greeley earned went to Brown instead.

Thus Ulysses S. Grant was elected to a second term as President of the United States in what might have been the strangest election of all time.