The Palin Disaster/Spectacularity

There's a recent poll showing Sarah Palin trailing Obama 55-33 in a hypothetical 2012 matchup. When I saw that, my first thought was... whaaaaattttt? That just can't be right, can it? The last time a Presidential election saw a popular vote margin of 22 points was, well, Nixon '72; also LBJ '64 and FDR '36. These are historic landslides we're talking about. So I was pretty skeptical.

But a couple of new polls from the good folks at PublicPolicyPolling makes me skeptical of my skepticism. Specifically, Palin trailing Obama by 14 points in North Carolina and Florida. When you put it that way, 22 points nationally just isn't that outlandish. So here's the 2012 map assuming Obama wins by 22 points and the swing is nationally uniform:

But of course, that's assuming a uniform national swing, an assumption on which Obama would win Washington, D.C. by over 100 points. Keeping in mind my previous discoveries about the counter-cyclical nature of big swing elections, I made up a scenario in which Obama beats Palin by 22 points that I thought was a little more realistic, i.e. pushing a lot of solid-blue states to the 65%-70% range and then making up what needed to be made up among the non-swing states. Here's what that ends up looking like:

Fun, huh? That's starting to resemble the great landslides of the past. Obama would win 518 EVs, with Palin taking home 20. Yeah, that's right: 20. Boy would this ever be fun...