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President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney will feel at home when they go to Florida for their final debate on Monday. That’s a state that has seen a lot of both candidates. But when their second debate concluded on Tuesday night, the two men sure left New York quickly. The president didn’t even spend the night and Romney was up at the crack of dawn to flee. After all, there was a campaign out there that demanded their return. And other than on a debate stage, it’s certainly not being waged in New York, the nation’s third most populous state. Or in California or Texas, the two biggest states. That’s 82.8 million Americans who are just bystanders in the most hotly contested presidential election in a decade.

Obama raced to Iowa and Ohio the day after the debate; Romney scurried off to Virginia. They were wooing voters in states totaling only 22.7 million residents, barely a quarter of the Big Three’s population. But their clout is bigger than their numbers; they — along with voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina — are Campaign 2012.

Much has been written about the hardy band of “battleground states.” But little has been written about why the American electoral map has shrunk so dramatically, what it tells us about the nation and what it means for future elections.

via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/it-s-down-to-just-8-states-for-obama-and-romney-20121018