Who Can Really Say?

Grit or Grin?

Daniel Drezner suggests a voting outcome I hadn't spent alot of time thinking about -- what if Gore wins the electoral college vote, but loses the popular vote?

Soooo..... here's some half-assed speculation that's perfect for this blog. What if both of these outcomes take place? Kerry might win a lot of the states Gore won, but by smaller amounts (see Tom Schaller for more on this). He'd lose the Red states by an even bigger margin than Gore did in 2000. However, in the battleground states like Ohio and Florida, Kerry would eke out enough votes to win them.

This leads to an intriguing possibility -- what are the odds that Kerry loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College? If that happened, how would both parties react? Would the Electoral College survive in its current form?

I don't know the answers to his questions, but I'm guessing at the very least it might cause one Democrat who's said to be poised to run in 2008 to grit her teeth -- or is that grin and bear it?

And follow the link in Drezner's update to a Slate article on five possible ways the election will end up in court.

Posted by Peter at October 19, 2004 06:00 PM