Barack Obama will finish his reelection campaign on Monday with a swing through Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa, where wins in all three states would all but ensure him a second term as president.
Obama will speak at rallies in Madison, Columbus and Des Moines. Bruce Springsteen will perform at all three capitols and Jay-Z will be on hand in Columbus, the campaign said Thursday afternoon.
It can hardly escape notice: without an upset in one of the reliably Democratic states, winning all three states would give Obama exactly 271 electoral votes, the minimum number to win the election even in the unlikely event the rest of the swing states slip away.
Nate Silver’s excellent 538 blog says that Obama enjoys a good chance to capture all three states, as do recent polls. The campaign brain trust must believe that trying to bulwark the three critical states is the best way to cement an Election Day win.
It is possible the the Obama campaign could boost its chances of winning by a large margin of electoral votes by directing its last-minute efforts at Florida, Virginia or other states where Obama’s electoral advantage isn’t as pronounced. My guess, though, is that they would prefer to have greater certainty of eking out a win by a few electoral votes even at the expense of tilting their fortunes to a greater degree in one of the other battleground states. Thus they have chosen to spend their most precious resource at this stage of the game – the candidate’s time – on the three swing states they can fall back on even if all else fails.
Iowans will find a poignancy to hosting the campaign’s final event on Monday night. Many proudly label Iowa as “the state where it all began,” citing Obama’s unexpected win of the 2007 Iowa caucuses as the event that established the legitimacy of his original campaign.
Six Weeks, Six Votes 