Electoral College Analysis Bodes Well for McCain

A research group based in Barack Obama's home state of Illinois is running the numbers and suggests a high likelihood that McCain will prevail in November:

Washington, Sept.18: The latest forecast of the Electoral College suggests that John McCain is way ahead of his Democratic rival Barack Obama.

The research to be presented at the annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences on between October 13 and 15, less than three weeks before the election, says that as of September 16, the margin in electoral votes could be as high as 282.8 votes for Senator John McCain against 255.2 for Senator Barack Obama, depending on the forecasting scenario.

Operations researcher Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, along with a group of students and collaborators at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, created http://election08.cs.uiuc.edu/, a math model that dynamically forecasts the outcome of the election.

Over 4,000 analysts and experts in analytics are expected to attend next month's meetings. Jacobson's model applies a mathematical model to state polling data, using a dynamic programming algorithm to forecast electoral results.

"The results from the 2000 and 2004 presidential election suggested that it can be difficult to predict the winner of the presidential election based on popular vote," says Jacobson.

"In fact, it is possible that the popular vote and the Electoral College vote can lead to significantly different results," he adds.

This is a more conservative estimate than the one I prepared, but I do think we could see split results between the popular and electoral vote. That would sure make things entertaining on November 5th.