NBC’s News Small Mistake and a reminder on how to do the Electoral College Maps.

       This http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/291443-clinton-tops-270-electoral-votes-in-nbc-map has been making big news. Its key take away is that Hillary Clinton has sizable leads in enough states to already be over the 270 electoral college votes that she needs to win. This has been pushed on MSNBC by NBC News as evidence of something profoundly new in this race.   We don’t have much quarrel with the states and districts that get Secretary Clinton to 273. However North Carolina, the state that MSNBC relied on to get Clinton to 288, is more perplexing.

 The RCP average for North Carolina shows Clinton with just a 2 point lead: 45.3 to 43.3.   Alternatively, It seems as though MSNBC leaned very heavily on their own poll to put the state in Clinton’s column.  The poll is certainly valid, but it is something of an outlier.  This is not to say Clinton is not ahead in North Carolina but it seems that it more properly fits in with the other toss up states.   Yet without the Tar Heel state, NBC would probably have been less likely to be so definitive about Clinton crossing the threshold if the margin had only a one state cushion and not two.  Thus we get a seeming political crescendo which really only tells us what we already know.  Kudos to NPR, which as we went to press released the same NBC map, yet put North Carolina into the tossup category. http://www.npr.org/2016/08/16/490103767/npr-battleground-map-hillary-clinton-solidifies-lead-against-donald-trump?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

NBC’s recent approach also gives us a chance  to re-examine the path to 270.  It is crucial when thinking about the Electoral College to start with the results from the last election firmly in mind. When Obama won by 3.9% nationally in 2012,he lost North Carolina by 2. When he won by 7.2%, he won North Carolina by a little more than .3% of the vote.  While States can and do move around somewhat in their order of how Democratic or Republican they are, such moving usually happens over many election cycles.  There are also usually signs that let observers see it coming. North Carolina likely has not jumped as much as the NBC poll suggests, and thus it should still be a tossup.  Clinton’s lead in states she needs is real but proclaiming such a lead based on North Carolina is foolish. NBC leaned too heavily on its own poll to reach this more interesting result.  It is understandable, but it is a bad way to think about getting to 270.