The 3 Strategies for a Romney Win

The 2012 Presidential Election is exactly 2 weeks away. I'm pretty excited. At this point, I feel confident narrowing in on Romney's victory paths. I define a victory path as a set of swing states that provide just enough electoral votes to win.

As of this moment, I am assuming the following swing state rankings in terms of the likelihood of a Romney win (greatest to smallest): North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. While each state is a separate election, they tend to follow similar shifting patterns and loosely follow this ordering. That means, for example, that it is highly unlikely that Romney would win Pennsylvania and lose Florida. So, this allows me to make a couple safe assumptions:

1. Romney will not win without North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia (all of which have been leaning slightly to Romney anyway).
2. If Romney wins Pennsylvania or Michigan, he will have most likely already achieved a minimum path to victory with the more probable states, making both PA and MI ultimately unnecessary.

This leads me to conclude that a Romney win will be decided by a combination of the results of the 6 most center swing states: CO, NH, OH, IA, WI, and NV. With these 6 battlegrounds, Romney has 3 key strategies: (1) Ohio+1, (2) Wisconsin+2, and (3) Sweep the West (aka the "Mormon Miracle" because of high LDS populations in NV and CO). Each of Romney's possible victory paths, categorized by these 3 strategies, are show below:

At this point, I am predicting if Romney wins it will either be by winning OH + CO or by winning WI + CO + NH. Although, I'd love to see the West Sweep happen just because an electoral tie would be super exciting for an election junkie like me. For viewing convenience, I show these three scenarios below (images created with 270towin.com)

Mitt Romney's Religion

Mitt Romney is a Mormon. In fact, he's the first Mormon to be nominated for President representing one of the major political parties. His campaign has spurred a lot of media attention on Mormonism, leading many people to wonder what exactly makes it different from the rest of Christianity. I, too, am a Mormon, and am always willing to answer people's questions about my beliefs with my Twitter handle (@jason_allred).

The main thing that makes Mormonism different than other Christian churches is our belief in a Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When Jesus lived on Earth, he suffered and died for our sins and was resurrected, overcoming sin and death for our sake. In order to help people follow His teachings and be saved, He established a Church, calling 12 Apostles to guide the people after His ascension.

However, eventually, people fell away from the truth, as prophesied, and killed the Prophets and Apostles. Without authorized leadership for the Church, teachings and ordinances were distorted, lost, or corrupted. This is why there are so many churches today teaching different doctrines while professing to believe in the same gospel.

Because God loves us, he once again called Prophets and Apostles to restore Christ's original church. The first of these prophets was Joseph Smith, who received a personal visit from God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ who called him to re-establish Christ's church on the earth. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (nicknamed Mormons) is that church and is led by a living prophet and 12 living prophets.

If you want to learn more about Mitt Romney's religion, now is your chance. The Prophet and the 12 Apostles of the Church will be addressing the world in a special conference this weekend. You can watch it online at gc.lds.org.



There are 4 major sessions at the following times:

1. Saturday (10/6) from 10am to noon MST
2. Saturday (10/6) from 2pm to 4pm MST
3. Sunday (10/7) from 10am to noon MST
4. Sunday (10/7) from 2pm to 4pm MST