Weigel

Romney at 47 Percent

It seemed only fair to Mitt Romney to wait on this one. His share of the popular vote, which stuck around 49 percent on election night, continued to fall as votes came in. Last week Greg Sargent rang the alarm, warning/gloating that Romney might sink below 47.5 percent of the vote. Yesterday, Aaron Blake announced Romney’s arrival at 47.4 percent, and started rounding down. I gave the guy more time. But now, via David Wasserman’s invaluable chart, we can make it official: Romney is down to 47.43 percent of the vote, making it impossible to round up. He is the 47 percent.

Other mostly random factoids:

- Obama’s margin over Romney is up to 4.4 million votes.

- There’s no state where the margin between Romney and Obama could have been erased by a switch of third party votes. Florida comes close, but the margin is about 15,000 votes greater than the total vote for all third parties.

- The effect of GOTV efforts is sizable, worth millions of votes. Overall, in swing states targeted by both campaigns, the raw vote decreased by only 0.22 percent. In other states, it fell by 4.34 percent. (The outlier in this latter group: Utah, up 6.12 percent for the first election with a Mormon candidate.*

*Not counting Joseph Smith’s first campaign.