Superstorm Sandy might just tip the electoral balance

With only six days to the U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama still has the easier path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

But a race that only a month ago was considered a slam dunk is now considered too close to call.

What happened? Mitt Romney won October, beginning with the first debate four weeks ago. In U.S. elections, October is everything.

Seventy million Americans saw the debate in Denver, including millions of independent and undecided voters who were engaging for the first time.

What they saw in Romney that night wasn’t the wealthy and self-interested investor of the Obama attack ads, but someone who had an idea of his country, and how he would run it. In other words, someone qualified to be president, or at least worthy of consideration.

In the first debate, Romney was sitting for a job interview, while Obama couldn’t be bothered to show up. The contrast was more than striking, it was devastating.

In some ways it was like the Canadian leaders’ debate in 1984, when John Turner said he had no option but to make a raft of patronage appointments, and Brian Mulroney replied: “You had an option, sir, you could have done better.” After that, the ground shifted under Turner’s feet, and Mulroney just kept growing.

Where Obama was leading by close to double-digit margins as October began, he’s running slightly behind in most of the national polls.

In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, as of Monday night, Romney was leading Obama by 47.6 to 46.8 per cent. Tuesday’s RCP numbers were Romney 48, Obama 47.1. That’s obviously within the margin of error, and either candidate could be ahead by about three points.

But the national numbers are only important in the sense that they reflect U.S. voters’ mood swings over the past four weeks.

What’s more indicative of where this race is going, and where it might come out, is the polling of the battleground or swing states, and the path to 270 for both Obama and Romney.

This is the U.S. equivalent of our first-past-the-post system, where it doesn’t matter who wins the most votes, but who wins the most seats.

The New York Times electoral map gives Obama 243 electoral votes, only 27 short of a majority in the 538-member Electoral College, in which each state has the same number of electors as it does U.S. senators and members of the House of Representatives combined. As well, there are three electors from the District of Columbia.

On that scorecard, all Obama needs is Florida, with its 29 votes, and he’s home for a second term. But he has other paths to victory.

Several swing states, Wisconsin (10), Minnesota (10), and Colorado (9), could get Obama there.

Yet while Romney’s path to 270 is narrower and while he remains behind in some battleground states, he has closed the gap in all of them in October, leads within the margin of error in Florida (29), is tied in Virginia (13) and is down less than two points in New Hampshire, where he has a summer home.

The Times now gives Rom- ney 206 votes, including 15 from the swing state of North Carolina. If Romney were to win those three eastern swing states, he would be at 252 electoral votes.

And Ohio, with 18 votes, would make 270.

The importance of Ohio cannot be overstated in any presidential race.

No presidential candidate of either party has won the White House without Ohio, with the exception of Jack Kennedy, since 1960. And no Republican has ever won the presidency without Ohio.

And why not? It’s mainstream, and it’s middle class from Cleveland in the north to Cincinnati in the south, with a lot of cities like Columbus in between.

Then there’s the other October surprise — superstorm Sandy, a thousand miles wide, affecting 60 million people in U.S., from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.

How Obama manages the storm, and how Romney doesn’t play it to partisan advantage, may be important in the next six days. As Sandy made landfall on Monday night, Obama appeared to be in command, calling governors from both sides of the aisle and announcing that bureaucracy would take a back seat to action.

For his part, Romney asked Americans to donate to the Red Cross, and scheduled a Tuesday event in Ohio, where he asked people to bring relief packages.

Too close to call.