Were you waiting for Slate staffers to disclose their presidential votes? Wait no longer. I supported Gary Johnson with an early ballot in D.C., for reasons entailed in the piece. And New York has published the raw digits from its pundit survey, putting a punch of hacks on the record as to who they think will win.
I appear on the list with a prediction of 276 electoral votes for Romney-Ryan, but New York didn’t run the caveat/explanation I sent in on November 3. Here it is – part one is the EV answer, part two the popular vote answer.
1. Romney, narrowly, with 276 electoral votes – all of the Bush 2000 states minus New Hampshire and Nevada, plus one electoral vote from Maine. (Had this been Bush’s map, he would have lost the electoral college. God bless the Sunbelt voter diaspora.) I can see Obama winning Ohio narrowly, though, which would hand him the election, which doesn’t make me much of a pundit.
2. Romney with 49.9 percent. The Sandy aftermath will cut Obama’s vote by at least 200,000, which won’t swing a state but will affect this bonus score.
That was 48 hours ago. Since then, I’ve grown more bearish on the Republicans in Ohio, as the final reliable newspaper and college polls arrive. And since then I’ve spent lots of time with different Ohio voter groups, and been surprised by the power of the Ds. So, if you like, you can unskew the prediction. I don’t buy the idea that Republicans are surging to a win in Pennsylvania, largely because they were saying days ago that it was “deadlocked” and saying today that it’s… tied. That ain’t no surge, daddy-o.
