It is practically unanimous that Obama has a safe lead in all the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico, which would give him 264 electoral votes. This means that he only needs to carry one of the eight states that are either tossups or lean Obama (FL, VA, NC, OH, IN, MO, CO, NV*) to win the election (*in the highly unlikely event that he carries only NV from that list it would result in a 269-269 tie, which would be an Obama win because of Democrat-led congress).
Via FiveThirtyEight, this lovely map from Swing State Project shows when polls will be closing on election night:
Among those possible Obama clinchers, Indiana and Virginia are the only ones whose polls will all be closed by 7pm eastern. Indiana looks very close right now, probably leaning slightly McCain. Virginia, on the other hand, is right up there with Colorado as the strongest for Obama on the above list. Most of Florida will be closed by 7pm, but it will also probably be much closer than Virginia.
So when Virginia is called for Obama, it’s gonna be over. The networks will say to wait for New Mexico so you keep watching, and they won’t make it official until 11pm when the west coast polls close. But Obama folks can start the party when Virginia gets called.
P.S. If somehow Obama does win all of the swing states in the eastern and central time zones and they get the close ones counted really quickly, they won’t even need to wait for the west coast polls to make it official.
11/2 UPDATE: With all the work McCain has been doing in Pennsylvania in the last couple of weeks, it is now polling similarly as Virginia and Colorado, so perhaps we can no longer include PA on the list of states where Obama has a “safe” lead. As Nate Silver said yesterday:
Tonight on MSNBC with David Shuster, I referred to Pennsylvania as being “in play”. I’ve also implied similar things in the polling threads over the past couple of days. Since we are showing John McCain as having only about a 2% chance to win Pennsylvania, I’ve had a couple of readers write in to ask whether I’m contradicting myself. Certainly we would not ordinarily refer to a state as “in play” when one of the candidates trails by 6 to 10 points, and there but a few days to go until the election.
What I want to make clear is that whenever I refer to Pennsylvania as being “in play”, you should imagine those little quotation marks around my words. You should also imagine that I’m speaking in the conditional tense. Were the national race to tighten by 5 points or so, then Pennsylvania might actually be in play, rather than being “in play”.
In this case, even if VA gets called first (which it probably will since the polls close an hour earlier), PA might really end up being the clincher.