This is Romney’s planned path to victory, in my opinion: Colorado, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire get him to 271 electoral votes without the need for Ohio. This is a long shot because Obama is ahead in every one of these states except North Carolina according to the most recent polls.
As of now, this is what I predict the final result will be on election night, with 303 electoral votes for Barack Obama.
From Nate Silver’s blog, upon which I rely heavily, is this chart of probabilities. Note the unlikelihood of a Romney win in Wisconsin; I believe Obama is campaigning there in order both to humiliate and damage Ryan, and to force Romney to put all his bets on Ohio. Similarly, with time running out, Obama threatens in Florida and keeps going down there (a win there for him would be a massive upset this year) which forces Romney to keep traveling there. He’s running Romney ragged.
Both Ohio and Wisconsin have extremely dishonest, corrupt Republican governors who have done incredible things, sometimes illegal, to interfere with and rig the outcome of the election. However I believe that if Romney won either of these states (he will not win both) through election process fraud, he would also lose the popular vote at the same time. At this point I don’t picture him sticking his neck out that far to take the Presidency, the backlash would be incredible. If he wins by only one state, the Democrats will take the state with the most controversial outcome to the Supreme Court of the U.S. and we’d have another election decided that way. That won’t happen.
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