What if

[jpmassar]

Suppose Obama and McCain had tied in the popular vote.
Who would have won?

Of course we'll never know; that would depend on exactly
how the equal vote split up amongst the battleground states.
But assuming each state changed its popular vote Obama-McCain
percentage difference by 7% in favor of McCain (the approximate
amount Obama won the national vote by), what does the map
look like?






Result: Obama 278, McCain 260

At what point does McCain win using this (rather crude and imprecise) algorithm?
He would have to have won the popular vote by somewhere around 1.5% - 2%,
which would have given him Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire. If he had
won the popular vote by 1% he would have gotten Colorado, which would
have resulted in a tie.

fivethirtyeight.com's final analysis claimed that Obama was 1.68 times
as likely as McCain to win the election given that he lost the popular
vote. It also claimed that there was a 0% chance of anyone losing the
popular vote by 3% or more and still winning the election. They
estimated the chance of an electoral college tie at 0.12%.