The Washington Post‘s resident conservative Jennifer Rubin has a post up with an odd amount of optimism for how the electoral map favors Mitt Romney. Rubin uses Real Clear Politics’ calculations as her baseline so I’ll stick with those numbers for now. By that estimate, Romney starts with 170 near-guaranteed Electoral College votes, a point Rubin triumphantly highlights while conveniently failing to mention that RCP also grants Obama 227 secure votes. Looking at the 141 electoral votes in the toss-up category Rubin writes:
To get 100 more and seize the presidency, Romney only needs some states that routinely went Republican before the 2008 race (Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia) and needs to hold on to a few that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) managed to win (Arizona, Missouri). This gets Romney to 273.
In other words, Romney doesn’t need to win (but he might) in New Hampshire or New Mexico. He would love to, but isn’t required to, break through in states like Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin or Michigan. (The first and last would seem the most likely.)
While it’s true many of those states voted for George W Bush, almost every swing state for 2012 is one that Obama carried in 2008, often by a wide margin. Pennsylvania is one of those states oft targeted by Republicans that is in fact reliably Democratic (the AP lists it outside their “up for grabs” category); Obama won Pennsylvania by 10 points last time around, and RCP’s average gives him a six percent advantage against Romney at the m. Once that pushes Obama up to 247 reliable electoral votes, he needs to only maintain a handful of the states that he won in 2008. Rubin casts Ohio, Florida and Virginia as the utmost important states for Romney, and for good reason. If the Republican loses any single one of those three it would be near impossible for him to overtake Obama, requiring an almost complete sweep of the remaining tossup states. It’s hard for Rubin to “shock” liberals when the map has a larger swath of reliably blue pockets.
Now, it’s certainly possible (and on the strength of the economy of the next several months, perhaps even probable) that Mitt Romney will reach that 270 barrier as easily as Rubin imagines. If Romney opens up a wide national lead-say five points overall-it’s hard to see Obama maintaining his strength across the states he won last time. As Jonathan Bernstein often argues local polls tend to track along national trends and it is still far too early to tell the campaign outlook six months in advance. But if it’s an election fought on the margins with the two candidates separated by a small margin, it’s hard to see any scenario where the map helps Romney.