[nascarnation]

Not exactly on your topic, but one reason I like Trump is that he won’t be afraid to call out the Republican Sec of State in places like Florida and Ohio relative to Democrat vote fraud.

[Don Corleone]

Dream on. The fix has been in for close to 100 years now.

[LS]

Even if nothing else were to change from 2012, Trump would have a much higher likelihood of carrying NH, NC, CO, NV, IA, FL. I think he would have a legit shot at OR, NM, and MI.

OH is going to be tricky based on what Kasich does after he loses. If he actively campaigns hard here, Trump would take OH. Unfortunately, this might be cause for Trump to make Kasich VP. VA will still be a challenge, and I have no sense of how much it has moved from the 2004 election for Bush.

Longer shots would be NJ and PA, but both, with Trump's "America First" approach, probably more in play than ever.

WI, always a teaser, is a possibility.

In short, I could easily see a 320 EV victory, a possibility of going beyond that, but so far no shot at the two big holdouts, CA and NY.

[Rockitz]

At the present time, there are 11 states with a total of 139 electoral votes that were carried by Barack Obama in 2012 which now have Republican governors. Of those 11 states, the states of Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin now enjoy Republican majorities in both houses of their legislatures. What this means is that, if the governors and legislative leaders in those 5 states understood what could be accomplished, they would take immediate steps to repeal the winner-take-all electoral system and adopt the Maine-Nebraska system. With Republican majorities in both houses of their legislatures, Democrats would be powerless to stop them.

As Captain Picard would say, "Make it so."

[blueunicorn6]

Giving nuclear weapons to Iran will fix all of this. The state of New York will be Republican after New York City is vaporized. California becomes Republican after the mushroom clouds go up over Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The Democrat voters will finally realize, as the shock wave blows down everything around them, that the Democrat Party leaders valued money over them.
Happy days are here again.

[BobL]

“...Democrats have fashioned an electoral map that gives them a relatively firm base of 22 blue states with a combined total of 257 of the needed 270 electoral votes.”

That is total bullshit (sorry) - I’m done reading. The Dems depend on whites splitting their votes between Reps and Dems (i.e., the Dem gets at least 40% of the vote) to win at least half of the above EVs.

Trump is changing that dynamic and is on track to win 65-70% of the white vote, and with that win the Midwest and parts of the Northeast. Combined with a possibility of getting 25% of the black vote, we’re looking at a LANDSLIDE next year.

Nice try though.

[cripplecreek]

There has been a push to do away with the winner take all system in Michigan but the GOPe is desperately clinging to it.

[chajin]

An unintended consequence of this would be up to 435 lawsuits the day after the election, questioning the votes in all GOP-Presidential-candidate-winning 435 congressional districts. This is because no election is settled until it is settled the way the Democrats want it settled, and then it is settled.

[Dr. Sivana]

The end result? In 2012, instead of a 332 to 206 vote victory for Obama-Biden in the Electoral College, the Maine-Nebraska system would have produced a comfortable 282 to 256 vote victory for Romney-Ryan, an outcome that would have been far closer to expressing the will of the people than the present winner-take-all system.

That's simply not true. If a majority voted for Obama, and Romney gets a majority of electoral votes, that is not closer to expressing the will of the people.

Our system anticipates the possibility of the winner of the electoral vote losing the popular vote, because it is important for the president to express the will of the COUNTRY, not just of the people.

Individual states, like Nebraska and Maine are free to change up their systems as tehy see fit, but it is folly to believe that the same dynamic taht makes for a large bloc of Democratic states won't change in the future. Indeed, only a couple of decades ago, the popular thinking was that the electoral college already favored Republicans, giving them a near lock on the presidency for the foreseeable future. After a weak candidate like George the Elder won in 1988 (running as Reagan's Third Term) it was easy to see why people would be drawn to that notion.

Since Clinton, the Dems have started to win or at least be competitive in the suburbs. That has made the difference. Also, whereas Yankee flight has tended to create more sunbelt Republican influence, lately the numbers got large enough fast enough that states like North Carolina and Virginia are starting to get infected like Vermont and New Hampshire did long ago.

I do not support Trump, but he puts all the numbers in play. He certainly makes the Dems have to consider his influence on the turnout in states like New Jersey and New York, and certainly Pennsylvania.

I do not trust him as a president, and would love to be proven wrong about him. However, he has demonstrated that it is possible to appeal to a broad spectrum without being a milquetoast or being obligated to splitting the difference over controversial issues. For a long time, I have maintained there are a lot of people in the wrong party, and we need a realignment so that those who have contempt for social-conservative/small government Republicans (a k a "the base") need to carve out a large biche in the Democratic Party, so they can workout a settlement with the professional victim classes with whom they are willing to do business. A lot of people who have sat out the system in general, seeing not a dime's worth of difference, plus those who would like to cut back on new open borders trade deals and agreements (NAFTA, WTO, GATT) are presently homeless, and should be given a voice in the Republican Party. They are natural allies.

This means less money for campaigns, fewer bennies for Republicans to get re-elected on the cheap, etc. It is the only way to have a conservative party that represents the base, keeping corruption within more workable levels.

[HarleyLady27]

Well this might have ‘been’ the way things were done, but it’s not going to be done this time....

We have a new Sheriff running this time, and he’s out for America, to Make America Great Again, and he wouldn’t be in this mess of what the ‘GOPe’ call a race if he didn’t intend on winning...

Oh and something else, he’ll find the ‘dead file’ voters, and he’ll fine the ‘illegal immigrant’ voter file and he’ll find a lot of other ‘files’ so don’t mess around with voter fraud, he can smell it a mile away!!!

[research99]

The entire premise is incorrect.

The House of Representatives controls the election of a President, should an electoral majority not be reached.

It happened in 1876 and could happen again.

[Lake Living]

This sounds reasonable and advantageous. Doing nothing or the same thing will assure the same results as we got last time.

I wonder if Biden really wants to run and how well Bernie would do nationally? I thought the media had gotten their marching orders on Hillary as there have been more hit pieces regarding her campaign recently. But now with the Just-Us Dept. declaring she has the right to wipe her server, I’m not so sure. Will the Dems really stay with her? The maddening possibilities!

[Redmen4ever]

The only state in which we control both chambers and we have the Governor, that we should switch is Michigan.

If we could switch Pennsylvania and Virginia, then we should switch those two sates as well as Florida, Ohio and all the other purple states we control. Were we to switch Pennsylvania and Virginia and the purple states we control, there would be something like a 5 point tilt in the electoral college. That is, we could lose the nationwide popular vote by 5 points and win in the electoral college.

This was all obvious after after 2010. But, the states dithered and then it was too late.

Since we can’t switch Pennsylvania and Virginia, we have to commit ourselves to winning Florida and Ohio and a few other purple states. Michigan is an exception. We’d only win Michigan in a landslide, and there are no statewide races in 2016 complicating a decision to switch to the Nebraska-Maine method.

[JLS]

If,

“Democrats have fashioned an electoral map that gives them a relatively firm base of 22 blue states with a combined total of 257 of the needed 270 electoral votes. ...?

and

“Republicans, on the other hand, have a firm base of 23 red states with a combined total of 191 electoral votes, leaving a total of 6 swing states… Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia… with a combined total of 90 electoral votes. ...”

were true and your strategy in a few swing states like Florida, Ohio, etc would put the Dims over the top.

Typically these types of analyses give the Dims their close states, i.e. PA, WI etc while pretending that every close GOP state like say NC or GA is in play every election. This is evidence that the “analyst” is just following the MSMediots who of course want to depress people like us and always skew the analysis to say to us give up hope.

[CaptainPhilFan]

What about the states that have signed an agreement to throw their EV’s to the popular winner....
(Hot Link)
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/2014/04/17/new-york-is-latest-state-reject-electoral-college