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270towin.com

I flipped the following states from Blue to Red (Dem to GOP)
To me, these seem to be certain flips

Florida
North Carolina
Virgina
Indiana
Nevada

That leaves Obama up 285-253

Then some interesting choices out there
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
Colorado

Ohio is the obvious one. Seems to be trending red again. If you add Ohio, then GOP wins 271-267, without getting anything else out there.

But there are ways to win without Ohio

Among them: Pennsylvania state legislature and Republican Gov. adopt plan to switch electoral votes from winner-take-all to a plan that gives a candidate 1 electoral vote for each congressional district won.

So lets go back to a non-Ohio scenario, in which Obama wins
285-253

If GOP splits the 20 in Pennsylvania, then that’s Obama winning, 275-263

So — excluding Ohio — that leaves Wisconsin and Colorado.

Either of those flipping, even without Ohio, gives the GOP a win — so long as Pennsylvania vote goes through and you get that hypothetical split of the 20 EVs in Pennsylvania

By next Labor Day, if the economy stays roughly where it is — 9 percent or more jobless rate, endless drifting with little progress in creating new jobs — the president is one and done.

The last unemployment report before the election will be Nov. 2, just 4 days before people vote. So there could be one last major dose of bad news to send Obama to his political doom.

The big caveat: FDR won re-election twice , in 1936 and 1940, before the war started — even with virtually no progress on improving the jobless rate.

Any challenger will have an uphill battle to unseat an incumbent. Even Ronald Reagan did. Carter only knew the Saturday before the election that he was toast. Until then, Reagan typically had a tiny lead, 1-3 points, but close to the margin of error. That became a landslide only in the final days.

-George