Why Ohio and Florida will decide who wins in 2004

Electoral College votes are not truly representative either. Regardless of the size of the population, every state receives two Electoral College votes for their two Senators. The number of US Congressmen in every state is determined by its population.

The number of US Congressmen in a state and its two Senators equal the number of Electoral College votes the state has. For example, California, the most populous state in the union, has 2 Senators and 53 Congressmen. Therefore, California has 55 Electoral College votes. The next populous state, Texas, has 34, and the third, New York, has 31. The total number of Electoral College votes is calculated as follows: 100 for US Senators, 435 for US Congressmen, and 3 for Washington, DC (which has a Congressman but no Senators), adding up to a total of 538.

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Since the Electoral College votes are an even number (538), mathematically it is possible that each candidate will end up with 269 Electoral College votes. In that case, the tiebreaker comes into play. The House of Representatives (Congress) gets to pick the President and the Senate picks the Vice President. Since the House of Representatives is almost certain to remain Republican majority after the November 2 election, they will certainly pick George W. Bush as the President. The US Senate now has 51 Republican Senators, 48 Democratic Senators, and one independent Senator who votes with the Democrats. There is a slight possibility that after the November 2 election the Senate may become Democratic majority. In that case, the Democrats could choose John Edwards as the Vice President. So there remains a remote, yet intriguing possibility of a US administration headed by a Republican President George W. Bush and a Democratic Vice President John Edwards!

Anyone following the American election will notice that none of the two major candidates, Bush and Kerry, campaign in the three states with the largest population and Electoral College votes -- California, Texas, and New York. This is because California and New York are solidly Democratic and Texas is solidly Republican. No amount of campaigning will alter these facts. In general, the East coast states north of Virginia, some northern Mid-Western states such as Illinois and Michigan, and the West coast states are Democratic, and the South and the rest of the Mid-West states are Republican. The two major candidates never waste their campaign money or their time in each other's strongholds. All their financial and campaign resources are devoted to the so-called battleground or swing states, which are too close to call and can go either way.

Out of the 50 states that make up the US, the American presidential election on November 2 will be decided by 11 battleground states, which have 121 Electoral College votes (the Democrats won 60 and Republicans 61 of these Electoral College votes in 2000). The battleground states with their Electoral College votes in parentheses are: Florida (27), Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), Wisconsin (10), Minnesota (10), Iowa (7), Oregon (7), New Mexico (5), Nevada (5), West Virginia (5), and New Hampshire (4). Among the battle ground states, the Democrats (Gore) won six (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa, and New Mexico,) and Republicans (Bush) won five (Florida, Ohio, Nevada, West Virginia, and New Hampshire) in 2000. Only a few hundred votes separated the winner and the loser in several of these states in 2000. According to recent polls, Pennsylvania is tilting towards Kerry, as are Oregon, and Minnesota. Bush has the advantage in Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico. However, the smaller of these eleven states, with few Electoral College votes, will not figure prominently in the presidential sweepstakes, which will be decided by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Mr. Bush will find it difficult to win Ohio, which has lost 250,000 manufacturing jobs during his presidency. With Pennsylvania headed Kerry's way, Kerry only has to win either Ohio or Florida to be the new President. To remain President, Bush must win both Ohio and Florida. It is as simple as that!

Historical precedents do not favour Mr. Bush. After all the spinning had run its course, the polls showed that Senator Kerry had beaten President Bush in all of this year's three presidential debates by a remarkably identical margin, 52 per cent to 38 per cent. Even when the candidates were courting Muslim American voters, Kerry was correct in referring to the "Qur'an" and Bush was off talking about "Moslems!" History shows that if a candidate is behind in the polls before the debates but sprints ahead after the debates (such as, Kennedy in 1960, Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992, Bush in 2000, and Kerry in 2004) he wins. If Bush is to win, he has to overcome of a lot of history that is against him.

Debates provide the voters with an opportunity to hear and see the two candidates side by side. If a neutral person, who did not know the identity of this year's candidates, was watching the debates, he would have wondered what "a peevish school boy" (Bush) was doing on the podium next to the intellectual running for president (Kerry)! Mr. Bush did not look what he was cracked up to be by the Republican reelection machine. Mr. Bush's smirk was back, so was the swagger, and the animated anger. And his lies. Missing was the substance, coherence, depth, and looking presidential. In the debates and out on the stumps Mr. Bush seems to be telling the Americans to forget about the mess he had gotten the nation into in Iraq with 1100 soldiers dead and 8,000 injured and no end in sight, the 1.6 million jobs that have been lost on his watch, tax breaks for the nation's wealthiest one per cent while the deficit ballooned to $423 billion this year alone, the 5 million people who lost their health coverage, the dangerous relaxation of clean water and clean air standards under him, as well as crashing of the stock market and the skyrocketing of the gasoline prices.

With no way to run on his horrendous record of last four years, Mr. Bush has chosen a path of personal destruction for his opponent, John Kerry. Bush's single-minded focus is to demonise John Kerry. Mr. Bush campaign mantra for the Americans is, "How can you possibly think of voting for this flip-flopping, tax-loving, gay-supporting, abortion-promoting, black-friendly, unpatriotic liberal from Massachusetts?" The Bushes do not give up that easily, truth be damned! After the enormous success of the Bush-backing "Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth" liars in almost destroying John Kerry, Bush supporter, the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, one of the nations most powerful conglomerates with 62 TV stations that reaches 25 per cent of American homes, has decided to air a 45-minute propaganda film before the election that will show John Kerry as a liar, a traitor and a "willing accomplice" of the enemy during the Vietnam War. Earlier this year, when ABC television's "Nightline" decided to read the names of the dead US soldiers in Iraq, Sinclair ordered its 62 TV stations not to carry the programme!

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, which has endorsed John Kerry, points out that Mr. Bush feels that God tells him what is right and that Mr. Bush equates "disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him." Even Republicans are worried by Bush's religious exhibitionism. Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan says, "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He (Bush) understands them, because he's just like them."

There is another piece of history standing in Mr. Bush's way. About 18 per cent of Americans are still undecided. History has shown that eventually the majority of the late undecideds tend to vote for the challenger. That the presidential race is a dead-heat with two weeks to go is also not good news for Mr. Bush. In a reelection campaign the incumbent either wins big (Johnson, 1964; Nixon, 1972; Reagan, 1984; Clinton, 1996) or loses big (Carter, 1980; Bush Sr., 1992). An election in which the incumbent seeks reelection is ultimately never close. If it is too close with two weeks to go (e.g. 1980 and 1992), as is the case now, the election breaks for one candidate or the other decisively just before the election. Barring unforeseen events, such as the sudden "capture" of Osama Bin Laden, in almost every case the election breaks in favour of the challenger.