Applying Muon's numbers to 2004, we get:
Bush: 292
Kerry: 245.
Meaningless, but interesting.
Don't even need Ohio to win, anymore.
That is why Dems need to focus more on the regions that are actually growing. The more they try the Kerry strategy of focusing too hard on one state, the mroe lopsided future elections will be.
Because the election was so close, Kerry had to focus on a handful of states. Only a handful were in "play". It wouldn't make much sense for him to focus on fast growing states like Arizona and Texas, where Republicans had sizeable wins.
Ohio and Florida were his only real chances of winning.
I believe if Kerry had more states in play, we may have been talking about the 1st Mid-Term of the Kerry Administration and Kerry's re-election. As it is, Bush won by a fairly sizeable margin as compared to 2000.
I know its been forever since anyone commented on this thread but I think Kerry had more states in play than you guys realize. If Kerry had focused on the Mountain West + Iowa rather than Ohio and Florida he could have won. He lost Iowa and New Mexico by less than a percentage point. And he lost Nevada and Colorado by 2.5 and 4.5 respectively. Although larger margins than Ohio both are smaller than Florida's margin. Also, Kerry made significant gains over Gore's performance in both Colorado and Nevada so I'm sure he could have pushed these closer had he paid more attention to them and less to Florida where he actually lost ground compared to Gore. If Kerry had taken NM, IA, CO, and NV he would have won.
