Ignore the Electoral College

Charlie Cook: “It is a source of constant amusement to me that so many people obsess — as if fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube — over the various combinations of states that could get either President Obama or Mitt Romney to the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College. The guilty include pros at both ends of the political spectrum; people who ought to know better; and armchair analysts who seem to think that they can crack the magic code.”

“The simple fact is that our nation has had 56 presidential elections. In 53 of them (94.6 percent), the winner in the Electoral College also happened to be the one with the most popular votes… So people are expending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out something that has about a 1-in-20 chance of happening.”