Milestones in Electoral College Totals.

Where will Obama--or, err, John McCain--end up on the electoral college? A few of the totals in the modern era.

271 - George W. Bush (2000)
297 - Jimmy Carter (1976)
286 - George W. Bush (2004)
379 - Bill Clinton (1996)
426 - George HW Bush (1988)
486 - Lyndon Johnson (1964)
520 - Richard Nixon (1972)
523 - Franklin Roosevelt (1936)*
525 - Ronald Reagan (1984)

Roosevelt, asterisked above, actually won a higher percentage of electors in '36 because we were still a 48-state country. What's especially interesting to me is that it's relatively rare for a candidate to get fewer than 300 electoral votes. It happened, of course, in 2000 and 2004. You have to go back to 1976 to find another instance. Even Kennedy pulled off 303 in 1960. Even including the early part of the century, when there were fewer than 48 states, getting fewer than 300 electoral votes only happened five times (!) between 1904 and 2004 (19%).

So getting 300 isn't that big a deal.