{"id":82,"date":"2008-09-19T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-19T14:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/09\/19\/what-if-its-an-obama-mccain-tie\/"},"modified":"2008-09-19T10:17:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-19T14:17:00","slug":"what-if-its-an-obama-mccain-tie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/09\/19\/what-if-its-an-obama-mccain-tie\/","title":{"rendered":"What if it’s an Obama-McCain tie?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the weirdest aspects of our very weird Electoral College system is that it’s possible for the candidates to…tie.<\/p>\n

And while that’s an okay outcome for soccer fans, it would likely be a disaster in American politics.<\/p>\n

Winning the presidency requires 270 electoral college votes.<\/p>\n

But one of my favorite, wonky-politics websites — FiveThirtyEight.com<\/a>
— is now reporting that there’s a 3.4% chance that John McCain and Barack Obama will end the long campaign in a deadlock.<\/p>\n

That means both candidates hitting the finish line with exactly 269 electoral college votes.<\/p>\n

The likeliest scenario (granted, not VERY likely) would go like this: “Barack Obama wins the Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, but loses New Hampshire.”<\/p>\n

Bingo – all tied up.<\/p>\n

Now, according to the U.S. Constitution, an electoral college tie is broken by Congress. Because we’re almost certain to have a Democratic majority, the victory would almost certainly go to Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

But there’s one more wrinkle. <\/p>\n

In most of the photo-finish scenarios “modeled” by the wonks at FiveThirtyEight.com, John McCain has won the popular vote.<\/p>\n

So. <\/p>\n

It’s just possible that our next president will have been chosen by a Democratic Congress, despite a tie-score in the Electoral College, and a popular vote that went to the Republican.<\/p>\n

Is that any worse than the 2000 election, which was essentially decided by a Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court?<\/p>\n

Probably not, but that was no picnic either. Let’s hope that come November, American voters will hop off the fence they’ve been straddling and make a firm decision, one way or the other.
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One of the weirdest aspects of our very weird Electoral College system is that it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}