Obama Pathways to Victory

Though there is nothing really new in it, Electoral-Vote.com has an enormously useful and clarifying discussion of the key pathways available for an Obama victory, and of the current state of play in each. Electoral-vote.com is, by the way, a site I have read obsessively every single election year I have been blogging, and I strongly recommend it to the attention of readers if they are not already reading it. It doesn't provide scoops so much as summaries of and reflections on current events and then provides sound projections based on very clear analysis of the facts (the vantage is progressive but it pulls no punches). It does grow quiet between elections and so you might have forgotten about the site even if you have benefited from reading it in the past. What the discussion I am linking to lacks from my perspective is the crucial addition of the ways in which these different pathways would differentially impact the composition of the House and Senate through the coattails Presidential fundraising, advertizing, and personal appearance priorities will generate state to state. As I have been saying since the mid-terms I am not particularly concerned about the outcome of the Presidential contest (which is not to say that I do not think a Romney victory would be catastrophic -- in terms of Supreme Court nominations, in terms of implementing healthcare and financial regulatory reforms already on the books, in terms of hardening Citizens United style plutocratic control of the election process, in terms of which political ideology gets credit, deserved or not, for what is likely to be at least an eventual cyclical upturn in the economy, in terms of another half-decade of neglect of urgent environmental problems -- it is just to say that I think a Romney victory is enormously unlikely, inevitable horse-race coverage by media outlets notwithstanding), I am more concerned whether the shape the Presidential contest takes will eventuate in a Congress that will partner with the President in the work to solve shared problems or will obstruct the President in the hopes of gaining thereby short-term political advantages even at the cost of long-term devastation of the country, the environment, and the lives of all its citizens.