Don't be fooled again: It's time to ignore national polls and focus on Florida, Ohio, etc.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Here is your every-four-year reminder that most of what you hear from the chattering class about the Presidential election is misdirection. The next president will be chosen by a handful of voters in a handful of states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and perhaps North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa. As always, it's a numbers game. As we are reminded often, and seemingly forget just as often, popular vote means nothing in presidential elections. Candidates must win states, in order to win electoral college votes, and they need 270 of them to win. That creates screwy dynamics and give some states (and the swing voters within those states) an outsized influence on the outcome. Why?

I'm giving away the punchline early in this story: 40 of 50 U.S. states have voted the same way in every election this century. Yup. Here, Larry Sabato et all offer a nice discussion of this reality.

As a "for instance," in the map above, the Republican candidate loses EVEN if he wins many of those "battleground" states. And that's not likely.

Play with your own possibilities at 270towin.com. But never forget: National polls mean nothing now, other than the vague notion of "momentum" or "overall sentiment." It's the swing voters in the swing states that count. Sorry, Democrats in New Jersey or Republicans in Texas, your votes don't really count any longer.

Here's Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball as it stands right now.

Where the Clinton-Trump matchup starts in our Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings pic.twitter.com/IpIryVRJFZ

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) May 4, 2016

Caveat, caveat, blah blah. A lot can happen between now and November, of course. Sure, you can imagine a whole bunch of other scenarios that might flip some traditional blue or red states if you like. The electoral map wasn't always this way; but what amazing force might send the electoral college map back to the days of Jimmy Carter? If I were a gambler, I wouldn't take that bet.

Instead, focus on what's been true for many election cycles: to win, Republicans will need a nearly clean sweep of all toss-up states. So listen carefully to state polls, and pay attention to news events in places like Florida and Ohio.

And I hope, as a by-product of that, you'll focus on how not-democratic this process has become, to the distinct benefit of entrenched politicians and power brokers in all those places that now wield out-sized power on the process.

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