Popular Vote verses Electoral Votes in an Election

In the newest of phrases by the Presidential candidates created by the 67th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner, both stood side by side and mocked each other in a moment of fun. But right after the dinner, both the President and the challenger Mitt Romney went back on the campaign trail. At the dinner, you witnessed two candidates that smiled and laughed and both believing that each one of them will win the Presidency.

The fact is that only one will win, but you must ask yourself with the recent upswing in popularity will the election turn out similar the the 2000 election when George W. Bush won the presidency will the electoral vote in his favor, just topping the requirement by 1 electoral vote at 271. It may happen all over again, as in the past 56 presidential elections, the popular and electoral vote have gone hand-in-hand in 53 of those elections. The challenger Mitt Romney is very optimistic that he will win, but 'Team Obama' has been outspending Romney in several battleground states, including Ohio and Florida and Michigan. But if you were the President's challenger, and had “scar tissue” all over your face in the form of Bain Capital, outsourcing, income taxes and offshore bank accounts, besides all of the obvious lying coming right from Romney's mouth, then if you were Romney, you could only hope that the race would be that close.

If it actually happens and Romney wins the popular vote but not the electoral vote, then you can bet that the Republican party will badmouth the Electoral College. That would be a bad thing. Regardless of whether the Republican party believes that their possible majority of outright votes should count for something, just look back at the 2000 race when George W Bush beat Al Gore even though the Democratic candidate had a half a million more votes in his favor. As much as I hate to say this, what happened was right. It “affirms that we vote as citizens of the several states”, not by a massive glob of residents separated by meaningless lines on a map.