Trailhead: A campaign blog.

Make Your Own Electoral College Pool

Politics is a horse race whether you like it or not, so you might as well gamble on it with your friends. Here are the rules the Slate staff is using for our (no stakes) Electoral College pool.

Contestants choose a winner for every state. Points are awarded based on how certain the state looks to go to one candidate or the other, rewarding correct picks that go against the current political winds, like so:

• 3 points for correctly guessing a tossup state
• 2 points for correctly guessing a leaning state in the direction it's leaning
• 6 points for correctly guessing a leaning state against the direction it's leaning
• 1 point for correctly guessing a safe state in the direction it's leaning
• 10 points for correctly guessing a safe state against the direction it's leaning

The status of each state is determined by our "Election Scorecard" feature, which uses data from Pollster.com. As a tiebreaker, players guess the percentage of the popular vote for both McCain and Obama.

If you want to organize your own pool by these rules, here's a form (Google spreadsheet or Excel file) that lists the tilt for each state and calculates the electoral score for each set of picks. We'll post another spread after the election that calculates the score for each set of predictions.

A note on strategy: Some have wondered whether it would make sense to gamble the other way on all the safe states, given that an upset in one of them is worth 10 times as much as guessing according to the polls. This strategy would pay off only if more than 10 percent of the safe states flipped between now and the election, a sufficiently low probability to make it a risky move.

Got any good stories from your office Electoral College pool? Send them along. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the sender specifies otherwise.)

Obama Doomsday Scenario Contest Results!

Yesterday, Trailhead invited readers to imagine what would have to happen for Barack Obama to lose the Democratic nomination. And boy did you respond. You, dear readers, are a motley assortment of creative and disturbed geniuses.

Scenarios tended to fall into a few categories: embarrassing revelations, major screw-ups, Clinton ex machinas, and unfortunate occurrences. Others involved Obama turning out to be someone—or something—other than himself, such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (“note that you never see the Rev. & Obama in the same place!”), “the smoke monster from Lost,” Dennis Kucinich in disguise, and John McCain’s illegitimate black child. Several other scenarios involved zombie attacks and alien invasions. Yet another described a heinous Aristocrats-like stage performance by the Obama family.

We can’t possibly share them all, but here’s a sampling organized by category. Winners are at the bottom.

Embarrassing revelations:

Obama is actually 34 years old, too young to be president.—Marc Sylvestre

Video surfaces of Obama at that Rev. Wright “God Damn America” sermon that he claims he didn't attend, especially if the video shows him applauding that statement.—Brian Weber

Obama photographed raising pinky while sipping latte!—Benjamin Clark

Customs agents find one of Natalee Holloway's “Carlos ’n Charlie's Aruba” T-shirts in his luggage.—Tom Grayman

Obama’s opening his mail while being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. He drops a Hallmark card. O’Reilly helpfully picks it up for him and reads the inscription: “Barack: Thanks for the visa! See you soon! Your BFF, Nadhmi.”—Boyd Reed

Pictures of an 8-year-old Obama in his local neighborhood bomb-making class with William Ayers and other Weather Undergrounders.—Jen Geiger

The Drudge Report uncovers shocking photographic evidence that Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden were actually college roommates. … They depict Bin Laden doing keg stands while Obama stands to the side holding his turban and counting in Arabic.—Rudy Santelises

He shot Alexander Hamilton. And there's video.—Andrew Rice

Reader Mark Schondorf submits a whole list of shocking twists, including: “Hillary summons a Kraken”; “Obama was a ghost THE WHOLE TIME!!!”; “Hillary goes back in time to kill Obama’s mother”; “Hillary wins because, as it turns out, she's Keyser Söze”; and “Unbelievably, the aliens are afraid of water.”

Major screw-ups:

Obama confesses that the blackout “ending” of the series finale of The Sopranos was his idea.—Scott Schiefelbein

The only way that Obama could possibly lose the nomination is if video of him punching a baby surfaced.—Nick Wilhelmy

There is only one unforgivable crime in America … dogfighting.—Tom Bianchi

The reason he doesn't believe the government created AIDS is because he did.—Shane Mehling

Clinton ex machina:

The best scenario for Hillary is to run as John McCain’s running mate. And for McCain to die.—Dea Henrich [So Obama would still be the nominee, but we had to include.—Ed.]

The Clinton campaign digs up records in the National Archives proving that Hawaii was not a state at the time of Obama's birth, thereby making him ineligible.—Pamela Belyn

Bill Clinton starts campaigning on his behalf before June 3.—Eric Samuels

Hillary sheds two tears.—Jon Cowan

Unfortunate occurrences:

Obama will need to be photographed windsurfing … and then get eaten by a shark.—Stephen Defibaugh

Obama, trying to fit in with the Oregon locals, goes on a white-water rafting tour arranged by Lanny Davis Excursions.—Boyd Reed

Hillary invites Barack to her home in Chappaqua to talk about ending the race. The visit eerily resembles the movie Misery.—Boyd Reed

The winners: The best submissions managed to make a concise joke, summarize all of Obama’s vulnerabilities at once, or vividly capture the mind-bending paucity of Clinton’s odds of survival. Here are three that did the job:

3^rd place: Hillary appeals to the Supreme Court, which, based upon a 2000 ruling, decides that the candidate with fewer votes wins the election.—John Kirkbride

2^nd place: Hillary Clinton must parachute into Pakistan while under heavy sniper fire, infiltrate al-Qaida using a fake beard, putty nose, and duct tape, and capture Osama Bin Laden, whilst singing the “Star Spangled Banner” with one hand over her heart and an American flag lapel pin prominently shown on her outfit. She must film all of this in HD and create a montage scored to Lee Greenwood's “God Bless the U.S.A.” Meanwhile, Barack Obama must publicly convert to Islam and change his name to Osama Hafez al-Mohammed Hussein Ayatollah Obama, while burning an American flag in the Crystal Cathedral as he replaces the crucifix with a do-it-yourself Piss Christ, while performing an abortion on the exhumed body of Terri Schiavo. He should also be naked. It should then rain frogs. That ought to do it.—Jason in San Diego

1^st place: One of the lesser-known consequences of quantum physics is an event called “quantum tunneling.” Here's how it happens: At a campaign stop in West Virginia, completely out of the blue, the aggregate wave functions of all the particles in Barack Obama's body end up instantaneously transporting him through the entire Earth and leaving him treading water somewhere in the Indian Ocean, or leaving his various particles scattered inside the mantle. The odds of this occurring are such that any macroscopic object tunneling through any barrier is highly unlikely in the lifespan of the universe, but it could occur!—Michael Blessington

Thank you for the submissions. You heard them here first!

Reader Contest: Obama Doomsday Scenarios

If yesterday’s primaries showed anything, it’s that the slings and arrows of the past few weeks—the Rev. Wright, the "bitter" comment, flag pins, and various other 'gates—have not put a significant dent in Barack Obama’s chances. Meanwhile, a consensus is building that Clinton cannot win unless disaster strikes the Obama camp. But if Wright spewing nonsense about AIDS conspiracies doesn’t derail Obama's candidacy, what will?

I’ve heard some pretty creative descriptions of what must happen to Obama or his campaign for Hillary Clinton to win the nomination. Back in March, Politico wrote that "she cannot win unless Obama is hit by a political meteor." Slate’s John Dickerson writes that for Clinton to catch up now, "she must bring more states into the union." In an episode of On the Media last month, Bob Garfield described one worst-case-scenario as "a video of Barack Obama in a motel room with a den of Cub Scouts setting fire to the American flag." To which I added, "He has to be client number eight, pretty much."

You can do better. What sort of out-there, long-shot, one-in-a-kajillion occurrences must happen to Clinton or Obama to bring about the Obamapocalypse and hand Clinton the nomination? Send your ideas here, and we’ll post the best ones later this week.