Obama's victory :A History

Dawn op

One of the many ways the election of Barack Obama differed from recent presidential elections was that in the end, it did not all come down to one state.

The addition on Thursday of the electoral votes from North Carolina - a state that had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 - brought Obama's total to 364, well above the 270 needed to win the presidency and the 162 won by Senator John McCain.

The final 2008 Electoral College tally is still not known because Missouri, which has 11 electoral votes, and Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District, which has one, are still considered too close to call. (Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that do not allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.)

So how does Obama's 364, which could go as high as 376, measure up?

"It's a normal win," said John Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who edited "After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College." Fortier called it a respectable, solid mandate.

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"It was not a blowout and not a really close election," he said. "We got a little bit used to these close elections. Until 2005, we were legitimately talking about a 50-50 nation, where everything was close."

Obama's commanding victory does break the habit of decidedly close contests of the last two election cycles. This time around, there was none of the hand-wringing, nail-biting or teeth-gnashing that followed the 2004 election, which the Democrats could have won if they had carried Ohio.

And certainly none of the conceding, unconceding, recounts, halted recounts and Supreme Court intervention of the 2000 election, which the Democrats could have won if they had carried Florida or any of a number of other states.

For a real blowout, think of the 523 electoral votes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt won in 1936, when he ran against Alf Landon, who won eight. Or more recently the 525 electoral votes President Ronald Reagan won in 1984, when Walter Mondale won only 13. Or the 520 President Richard Nixon won in 1972 against George McGovern, who won 17. Those were the widest electoral vote margins.

The disputed 2000 election, by the way - in which George W. Bush ended up with 271 electoral votes - was not the closest on record. The 1800 election produced an electoral-vote tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr and was decided by the House of Representatives. And the election of 1876 was a real squeaker: after the disputed election was put before a special commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices, Rutherford B. Hayes beat Samuel Tilden by a single electoral vote.

Obama's victory was more along the lines of Bill Clinton's in 1992, when he won 370 electoral votes to the first President George Bush's 168.

It was a margin wide enough that neither side made a major effort to contest or challenge votes to try to flip a state. In the waning days of the contest, the McCain campaign raised many complaints about possible voter fraud, which some Democrats feared was an effort to lay the groundwork to challenge a Democratic victory.

And that Obama won both the popular vote and the electoral vote means there has been little outcry questioning the fairness of the Electoral College, as there was in 2000 after Bush lost the popular vote but still won the presidency.

Robert Bennett, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies the Electoral College, said there were still a number of other potential problems - "land mines," he calls them - with the Electoral College system. The most serious, Bennett said, was the problem of what are called "faithless electors," or electors who decide not to follow the will of the voters in their states.

"It's unlikely to explode, but it could really be mischievous," said Bennett, who wants states to act together to pass uniform legislation to make it impossible.

Faithless electors have never changed the outcome of an election, but they do pop up from time to time. In 2004, one of Minnesota's 10 Electoral College votes was cast for John Edwards instead of for the Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Since the electors' votes were not signed, it was never discovered who gave Edwards his lone electoral vote; at the time other electors in Minnesota speculated that it had been a mistake.

And in 2000 - after the Supreme Court ruling dashed his hopes to win Florida's electoral votes, and with them the presidency - Al Gore lost yet another electoral vote. A faithless elector from the District of Columbia left her ballot blank to protest Washington's lack of a voting representative in Congress, an abstention that left Gore with 266 electoral votes, one fewer than he had expected.