You can find a cool interactive electoral college map here. What’s immediately noticeable is how difficult a task Mitt Romney has. If he’s not going to seriously contest Pennsylvania or Michigan or even Wisconsin (which apparently is the case), and if you assume that New Mexico and Virginia are out of reach for idiosyncratic reasons (both have a third-party candidate with ties to their respective states, just sucking away support from Romney), which I think is all reasonable, then all Obama has to do is to win just one swing state. Any one of them will do. Nevada works. Colorado works. Ohio works. Florida or North Carolina work too. Just any one of those. Anyone think Romney is going to be perfectly adept at handling all those very different electorates? I guess we’ll see, but I’m skeptical.

This is what a diminishing electoral base looks like. And it’s only going to accelerate.