Let's Handicap 2008! (Part I)

I know, I know, JUST what you were looking forward to reading about first thing in the morning. I'll allow you a few minutes to clean the coffee/juice/milk/syrup off your monitor. The groaning in agony, though, will just have to wait.

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Let's start on the presidential level.

We know the Democrat nominee - current New York junior Senator Hillary Rodham...uh. Clinton. Everybody thinks they know who the Republican nominee will be - current Arizona senior Senator John "Palpatine" McCain. If I know my party, and if they know what's good for them electorally speaking, it'll be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (as the best of a bad lot).

I'm not going to get into any personal or ideological discussion of Hillary or Romney or anybody else. My purpose here is to take a gander at the actual nuts & bolts of the 2004 numbers to provide an idea of which states may be amenable to flipping, and which side would have more flippable opposition states available to them.

We'll use as a baseline the range established by how many states were decided by single-digit margins and what the Electoral Vote totals would be under the best-case (i.e. table-running) scenarios for Hillary and Whomever.

Here are the vulnerable "red" states: Arkansas (6), Colorado (9), Florida (27), Iowa (7), Missouri (11), Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), Virginia (13).

If Mrs. Clinton picked all of them off in a Bush legacy-rejecting, Clinton nostalgia embracing tsunami, and lost none of her vulnerable "blue" states, she would romp to a 355-183 Electoral College blowout and another lease on the White House that, when she got finished, would become a permanent deed.

On the other hand, if the pendulum were to swing back the other way two years from now, these are the states that could be changing color: Delaware (3), Hawaii (4), Maine (4), Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), New Hampshire (4), New Jersey (15), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (21), Washington (11), Wisconsin (10).

On an optimum Republican night, and if Hillary is as "unelectable" as some on the center-right persist in trying to convince themselves, President-Elect Romney would be celebrating a 392-146 stomping of the witch of Chappaqua, and half the country would be heaving a collective sigh of relief large enough to knock satellites out of low Earth orbit.

Doing the math, we (the GOP) have 103 Electoral Votes at significant risk, and they (the Democrats) have 106. So the equilibrium would appear to rest on the GOP side of plumb.

That, of course, rests on the assumption that the seemingly immortal "50/50 nation" paradigm remains in place. It also depends upon the extent of the Donk excesses on Capitol Hill over the next biennium and how quickly the disasters ensue from the retreat from the Middle East that they are going to force.

But most of all, it does not take into account the strange, unexplained behavorial dynamics that always seem to accompany the presence of the name "Clinton" at the top of ballots across the country, almost mystically compelling voters to pull the lever against their own self-evident interests.

You want a gut-pick now? Figure Hillary keeps all the "blue" states and flips Ohio and Florida (imagine how they'd celebrate the irony) for a 303-235 victory, and America's effective end as we have know it for 232 years.

Will the voters install Hillary with a built-in GOP check on Capitol Hill, as they did her hubby? We'll look at that last-ditch prospect next.