The 10 closest states in Election 2012
After spending months staring at the electoral map and trying to puzzle out which states might go for President Obama, which for Mitt Romney and by how much, we thought it was worth sorting through the actual results to find the 10 states where the two men ran closest.
These 10 states are likely to be the swing states of the future, the places where both parties — in presidential elections but also midterm races — target their time and money in hopes of swaying a relatively evenly divided electorate.
Before we get to the list of states, a few fun facts:
* Of the 10 states, Obama won nine of them. (North Carolina was the lone Romney victory.)
* Only one — Florida — appears likely to be decided by less than a single percentage point. (At the moment, Obama leads Romney by 0.6 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting. That’s a change from 2008 when three states were decided by less than a point: Missouri (0.1 percent), North Carolina (0.4 percent) and Indiana (0.9 percent).