As I’ve wearily watched the Presidential and less interesting but consequential Congressional campaigns I’ve begun to wonder why I haven’t seen one really important piece of information reported in the news: how the Presidential race is breaking down by electoral college votes.  All we hear is that Obama or McCain is ahead or behind by some small percentage of the popular vote.  That’s all fine and dandy, but that doesn’t give us an accurate picture of what’s really going on out there.  As we’ve learned in recent elections you can win the popular vote and lose the election, just ask Al Gore, so if you really want to know what’s going on you need to look at the electoral vote breakdown.

So I’m heartened to find that Nate Silver, the Baseball Prospectus genius, has a blog that breaks down the election by electoral votes in addition to the popular vote.  A month before the election he gives Obama an 85.4% chance at winning the election even though he shows that Obama will get 51.4% of the popular vote to McCain’s 47%.  Why the high likelihood of winning for Obama if the popular vote is so close?  Because he projects Obama getting 336 electoral votes to McCain’s 202.  In other words he foresees a butt-whipping.

Personally I think the media is shying away from electoral college projections for the same reason that the pre-game shows in sports take an "anything can happen on any given day" approach to game analysis.  They know that if they admit that the game is likely to be a blowout you’re likely to tune out, and they’d rather be wrong and have you watching than accurate and have you stop watching or reading their "analysis."