16 questions that will determine who will win the presidency Soon we will know. After a campaign where no fact, poll, or dependent clause was beyond debate, we're going to start getting actual votes. Barack Obama's ground game will either live up to the hype or it won't. Mitt Romney will either win Ohio's 18 electoral votes and prove almost every poll wrong or he won't. Obama will either win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota or David Axelrod will have to shave his mustache. The voters will finally speak, which reminds me of Mo Udall's line after losing: "The voters have spoken. The bastards. Here are some of the questions I'm hoping will be answered by the poll results and the exit poll tabulations. I've had such good luck with thoughtful reader responses recently, I'm also interested in what questions you'll be looking to have answered on Tuesday. Email me your ideas at slatepolitics@gmail.com. Will the popular vote winner match the Electoral College vote? Election watchers started to talk about this possibility when Romney led in the national polls but not in the battleground states. If it does happen, we may not know until after Election Day, as provisional ballots, military ballots, and mail-in ballots are tallied. Some Western states, not crucial to the battleground competition, may still be counting their vote for days. What economic question mattered most to voters? Obama has consistently polled ahead of Romney when people are asked which candidate cares about people like them. Romney has consistently out-polled President Obama when people are asked which candidate can better handle the economy. The exit polls should help us understand which question voters had in their head when they made their choice. How much has the electorate changed? If President Obama wins, what will his coalition tell us about the electorate? In 2008, he won 80 percent of the minority vote and 43 percent of the white vote. Minorities represented 26 percent of the electorate and whites the remaining 74 percent. He is almost certain to increase his share of minorities, with such strong support from Hispanic voters, but will they turn out? The fewer of them who turn out, the more Obama will need to stick close to his 2008 share of the white vote. If Mitt Romney wins, it will be either by maximizing his totals among white voters--beyond the 55 percent that McCain received. (Ron Brownstein says he needs to get 61 percent. Gallup's most recent weekly data has Romney at 60 percent with whites.) Or, Romney will need white voters to make up more than 74 percent of the electorate. That's unlikely. Whites have declined as a portion of the electorate in every presidential election since 1992. Does Obama's coalition include white college-educated women? In 2008, Obama lost white men and women without college degrees and he lost among men who had a four-year college degree. But he won a 52 percent majority of white women with a four-year college degree. He's been going after that vote very hard this campaign by talking about pay equity, health care insurance for contraception, and trying to tie Romney to the abortion views of more extreme elements of the Republican Party. Will he keep his majority and maybe expand it? Who did blue collar white men in Ohio vote for? Nationally, Democrats traditionally lose the white blue-collar male vote. Walter Mondale only received 31 percent of their vote nationally. Obama won 39 percent in 2008, which was actually the party's best performance in a long time. In Ohio, Obama may do better because of his support for the auto bailout and his relentless attacks on Romney for embodying everything that caused the economic downturn--an outsourcer, a layoff artist, and a distant Wall Street-like executive. If Obama can hold down Romney's margins with this group, it might be his key to winning the state. Did the relentless ads in Ohio doom Romney? This will be hard to tell from the exit poll data, but if Romney does poorly with white working-class voters--a group Obama is doing poorly with in polls in the rest of the country--it may be attributable to the barrage of ads run against Romney in the state. Hopefully the exit polls will ask about the auto bailout as well as which candidate "cares about you." Answers to those questions might give us a basis for some early conclusions, especially if Obama does better on the "cares about you" question in Ohio with white male blue-collar voters than in other states. Did Obama build two different coalitions? If Obama wins in Virginia, Colorado, or Nevada, it will be because he combined suburban college-educated women, younger voters, and minorities. If he wins in Ohio, it will be with a very different coalition. To win nationally, Obama was supposed to build a minority-focused coalition and get around the bad economy. If he wins Ohio, it will likely be because he did better with nonminority voters and because of his contribution to the state's economy. Should Romney have introduced "Moderate Mitt" earlier? I'm not sure how we'd test for this in the exit polls, but based on the responses of the undecided voters I corresponded with, the governor's more moderate tone was highly appealing. By most polls, this race only got tight after the first presidential debate, when Romney unveiled his more moderate posture. If only he'd deployed it earlier, some undecided voters have told me. What if he did? Would he have had enough time to elbow Obama off the political center or would it have cost him the conservatives he always needed to be competitive?