That's right. 8 pm EST, Tuesday. That's when the polls close in the eastern time zone. And while it might take a little while to call all of those states, we should be ready to have one really big happee.
Why? Because we understand the maths!
Let's start with the Real Clear Politics map and Nate Silver's 538 state probabilities.
First, we're going to have to clear up "Real Clear" politics map. Michigan is not in play. Neither is Pennsylvania. If we take care of those, we get the following map:
So - Obama starts with 237, Romney with 191. Looks close. Ohh Noes!!!
Or nots. There are five states in the eastern time zone which are all "toss-ups". Now we're going to go with some of Nate's statistical voodoo and look at the probability of an Obama win for each of these:
FL 41%
NH 75%
NC 18%
OH 78%
VA 62%
Conversely, Romney's chances at each state is just 100% minus the amount above.
Now, we've got five states with odds of going either way. It turns out that there are 25=32 different ways for this to turn out, ranging from all Obama (not likely) to all Romney (snowball's chance in hell). If it was 50% for each, then the odds for any one of the 32 possibilities would be 1/32. But the odds are not the same.
Let's take, for example, the odds of winning VA and OH, one of the 32 options. We calculate the probability of this as the odds of VA going for Obama (.62) times the odds of OH going for Obama (.78) times the odds of the other three states going for Romney (.59 x .25 x .82). The result?
(.62 x .78) x (.59 x .25 x .82) = .058 = 5.8%
That particular option would give Obama 237 (base) + 29 (FL) + 18 (OH) = 284
We Haz A Big Happee!!!
So we've got 32 different possibilities for these five states. The math is pretty simple. We calculate the probability for each according to Nate's state polling model, multiply like above, and then add the probabilities which get us over 271. (In the interest of brevity, I won't include that table.)
The result - There's a 63% chance that this election will be effectively decided in Barack Obama's favor when the polls close in the eastern time zone. What's more, even if we don't get to 270 in these five, there are still four more "toss-up" states - Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada - to make up the difference.
Disclaimers. Of course, your statistics are only as good as your data. As some, including Nate, have pointed out, there could be a systematic error in the state polling. And we're relying on having none of the blue or red states on the map flip - I've done a pretty simplistic analysis. If you want to include all the states, and worry that maybe, just maybe Minnesota might be in play - well, see Nate Silver and 538. You see all the little line graph titled "Electoral Vote Distribution"? He's done that for 50 states, I've just done it for the five battleground in the eastern time zone.
And of course it might not be clear at 8. It might take some of those states a few hours to be called. Let's hope it doesn't take a few weeks. I'm not sure my liver can take another one of those.
I'm not saying we're going to win, but I'm tired of all of the hand-wringing. To use a football analogy - Team Blue is ahead by two points in the fourth quarter, with four minutes to go. We keep the drive alive, we win. So let's put the pedal to the floor and turn those oh noes into hell yes's!
6:53 PM PT: As a couple of commenters have pointed out, my analysis is simplistic because that the state probabilities are interdependent not independent. I'm laughing right now, 'cuz I love this community even with the (deserved) critique - this is a sharp bunch.
This is why I hang out here, for the fact-based reality.