Electoral College Simulator Predicts Mitt Romney Victory

An electoral college forecast model has a surprising prediction about the 2012 election — Mitt Romney will win in a landslide.

The model was created by two University of Colorado professors, one from Boulder and the other from Denver, The Huffington Post reported. The model looks at economic indicators from all 50 states to predict the race’s outcome, and it found that under the current conditions, Mitt Romney would defeat President Obama 320 electoral votes to 218.

Not only would Romney trounce Obama in the election, but he would do so by winning nearly every state even marginally close, The Associated Press reported. Under the simulation, Mitt Romney wins Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Colorado.

“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” said Ken Bickers, the model’s co-creator, in a press statement.

Though the election predictor may be shocking, it doesn’t come grounded in reality. The Huffington Post currently has Obama winning 257 electoral votes to Romney’s 191, with only six states in the toss-up category. FiveThirtyEight, a political blog written by election guru and polling expert Nate Silver, predicts Obama will win at least 294 electoral votes.

Polling also suggests that some of the state’s the election simulator has going to Romney are safely in Obama’s corner. He maintains healthy leads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, for example, and had been leading Wisconsin by a comfortable margin until Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as a running mate tightened the race.

Even Michael Berry, the election simulator’s co-creator, warned against looking too much into the results.

“As scholars and pundits well know, each election has unique elements that could lead one or more states to behave in ways in a particular election that the model is unable to correctly predict,” Berry said in a statement.

But there is history on the side of the election simulator, its creators said. It has picked the right winner every year since 1980.

[Photo by Gage Skidmore [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons]