Election Night Prep

If you have a few minutes to spare before you settle in to watch the election returns tonight, I urge you to read Carl Cannon's article in Reader's Digest.

In it, he presents four "scenarios" that could occur. I suppose they're the most plausible scenarios.

Until the votes are counted, anything is mathematically possible.

Anyway, Cannon says the four scenarios are:

• Barack Obama wins a close election over John McCain, the nation's "fifth in a row if you factor out the muddying presence of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996."
  
  It's unclear, to me, what, in Cannon's opinion, qualifies this scenario to be "close," since he suggests that Obama will receive 52% of the vote and 350 electors.


• McCain turns things around in the closing days, "eking out narrow victories in Pennsylvania and Florida, and winning in Ohio by the same margin as George W. Bush did in 2004."
  
  In this scenario, McCain gets 49.5% of the popular vote, and Obama receives 48.5%.


• The "Republican doomsday scenario" is that Obama and the Democrats enjoy a reversal similar to the one Ronald Reagan and the Republicans brought about in 1980 — as Obama "attracts the passionate support of all those in his own party, nails down the late-deciding swing voters, and proves a magnet to first-time voters, many of them young Americans going to the polls for the first time."


• Obama wins "handily" in the popular vote, but loses in the Electoral College.
  
  That sounds reminiscent of the 2000 election, which Cannon acknowledges, but he takes it a bit farther.
  
  "This time, the numbers could be much more undemocratic," he writes, "a result that would be disenfranching to a clear majority of Americans and would generate ill-will that would have an explosive potential."
  
  If you don't think it could happen, read Cannon's scenario.

Hopefully, when the voters hand down their verdict, it will be decisive.

The last thing this country needs is another election that hangs in the balance over hanging chads.