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