While it thankfully wasn’t necessary to a determination of the winner of the Electoral College this time around, as of today there still hasn’t been an official winner declared in Florida thanks largely to uncounted absentee ballots. Despite that, President Obama has a lead of roughly 50,000 votes and it was quite apparent as of this morning that Mitt Romney was not going to be overtake him. The only question remaining was whether, after the count was done, the gap between the two candidates would be small enough to trigger an automatic recount under state law. With this announcement from the Romney campaign, it would appear that this won’t be happening regardless of the outcome:
Though votes are still being tallied, President Obama is all but assured a victory in Florida because the lion’s share of the outstanding ballots come from Democratic-heavy counties.
Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney by 55,825 votes — or 49.9 percent to 49.24 — but there just aren’t enough votes from Republican areas to allow the challenger to catch up.
Romney’s Florida campaign has acknowledged he lost in Florida as well. Romney already conceded the national race after he lost the other battleground states.
“The numbers in Florida show this was winnable,” Brett Doster, Florida advisor for Romney, said in a statement to The Miami Herald. “We thought based on our polling and range of organization that we had done what we needed to win. Obviously, we didn’t, and for that I, and every other operative in Florida has a sick feeling that we left something on the table. I can assure you this won’t happen again.”
With Florida’s 29 Electoral College Votes, Obama will have 332 votes to Romney’s 206
This also means that I ended up one state off in my prediction. I forecast Florida to go to Romney based largely on the RCP average that gave him a slight lead in the state. Oh well. Still, 49 out of 50 isn’t too bad.
