I've Got Election Addiction!

These are the days when many folk say, "I just can't wait for it (the general election) to be over."

Unless you are a political junkie.   That would me.

And the availability of endless, intricate political analysis on both the Internet and around-the-clock cable news is just feeding the addiction.

You could start with an aerial view:  an analysis of how Romney will win the popular vote. 

The polling currently suggests President Obama has a hard ceiling of about 47 percent, perhaps 48 percent. Let’s take the 50-47 split found currently in the Rasmussen, Washington Post, and Gallup tracking polls. Presume that most of the remaining undecideds stay home and that the vote for third-party candidates amounts to about a percentage point. Under that scenario, we would see a 51 percent to 47.9 percent popular vote win for Romney.

Unless you are watching MSNBC, in which case, Romney's momentum has stalled.

 Numbers from both Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and the New York Times‘ Nate Silver indicate that Romney surged after the first debate, but after Oct. 12, the momentum shifted to Obama. He’s ahead by at least a couple points in enough states to keep his job as president, and if current polling trends come to fruition on Election Day, Obama could add Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin to his “win” states, giving him 271 electoral votes.

Perhaps you'd like a county-by-county breakdown in Wisconsin.

The Milwaukee collar counties (Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee) are mostly Republican and will turn out strongly for the Romney/Ryan ticket. The Fox River cities up through Green Bay are not as well organized and the GOP needs to put more ground game effort there first, and then second work west of Madison to LaCrosse and south along the river. 

Or maybe the election comes down to two counties in Ohio:

If the race for president can be boiled down to two key counties in one key state, then those jurisdictions are Hamilton and Cuyahoga, here in the Buckeye State. Mitt Romney began a three-stop tour of Ohio on Thursday in the former, and President Obama ended a 40-hour blitz of swing states in the latter.

After digesting all this data, and more, you can understand why this post on "election addiction" hits a little TOO close to home:

From mid-July to mid-October, I became addicted—to the Presidential election. By October 20, I was looking at the FiveThirtyEight blog at least four times a day, and was constantly checking Google News and other websites.  This was a classic addiction—after three or four searches each time, I stopped because my marginal utility was diminishing.  But after another hour without my “fix,” I had to search again and got tremendous pleasure from that first search.  The addiction was interfering with my work.The theory of rational addiction suggested a solution—go cold turkey.  So I vowed not to look at theFiveThirtyEight blog—and I’ve now been “clean” for 6 days.  To mitigate my withdrawal symptoms, watching the NLCS and the World Series has served as my methadone. Watching baseball for me has the virtue that it’s self-contained—I’ve not developed any addiction and only watch the games.  And if I can stay clean through Nov. 6, my problem will be solved!

Why, yes, I HAVE been watching quite of bit of baseball lately.  And flipping to Fox during commercials.