The Popular Vote

Right now, Barack Obama has 63.7 million popular votes to John McCain’s 56.3 million, whereas third party candidates have roughly a collective 1.6 million. That works out to 52.4 percent of the vote for Obama and 46.3 percent for McCain … conspicuously close to our pre-election estimates of 52.3 percent for Obama and 46.2 percent for McCain.

I went through and tried to estimate where the outstanding votes are, by simply extrapolating outward from the current results in each state that has missing precincts. This is fairly crude, obviously … in Oregon, for instance, a disproportionate amount of the uncounted vote is in Portland, so Obama will probably perform better than these numbers. Nevertheless, here are the numbers of votes I estimate to be outstanding in each state:

State           Obama     McCainWashington     695,268   499,804Oregon         310,503   238,511California     191,120   115,622Colorado        96,463    84,083Ohio            54,438    50,229New York        44,014    25,994Florida         41,451    39,482Maine           33,925    23,641Illinois        33,253    19,938Pennsylvania    32,170    26,102New Hampshire   30,948    25,299New Jersey      20,949    15,565Connecticut     19,262    12,373Massachusetts   19,093    11,152Georgia         18,295    20,428Virginia        18,106    16,539Maryland        14,234     8,821Indiana         13,811    13,546Arizona          8,602    10,231Arkansas         8,516    12,894South Carolina   8,510    10,189Alabama          8,197    12,765Vermont          6,247     2,951Mississippi      5,231     6,914Nebraska         3,191     4,439Alaska             812     1,377TOTAL        1,772,938 1,342,580

So, roughly another 1.8 million votes for Obama and 1.3 million for McCain … most of the “missing” votes are in strong Obama states. That should get Obama’s margin in the popular vote up to about 6.3 points, or a net of around 7.85 million votes.

There are also provisional and absentee ballots to be counted in many states … the former will tend to favor Obama, the latter McCain. Total turnout should be somewhere in the 125-130 million range, actually not that much higher than 122 million that turned out in 2004, but still very impressive by modern standards.

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

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