So winning the McCain states, plus Indiana, plus Nebraska’s 2nd District gives Romney 191 electoral votes. Adding the next-closest state (North Carolina) gets him to 206 electoral votes. And so forth.
Even though Romney is winning in the popular vote right now by 0.7 points (as of this writing), he trails in the state presently containing electoral vote number 270 by 1.3 points. In other words, as of Thursday afternoon the RCP Average suggests that the Electoral College is biased by two points toward Obama, which would be one of the largest biases ever.
Why might this bias persist through Election Day? The argument would go something like this: Barack Obama’s ground game and swing state spending advantage create something of a firewall in key swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Under this theory, the outsized Obama presence in these states makes them “sticky.” In other words, at a time when the rest of the country moves heavily toward Romney, these states will be less likely to do so.
I find this hypothesis particularly persuasive for Ohio, where the auto bailout and Bain Capital air assault might have immunized blue-collar whites in northern Ohio from the same forces that have drawn similarly situated whites toward Romney nationally.