The current vote tally shows Barack Obama with a nationwide margin of 3.5% over Mitt Romney.
The state that provided the decisive electoral college vote (the ah-hem, tipping point state) was Colorado, where the margin is 5.4% in Obama's favor.
Obama could've lost every state he won by less than 5.4 points (Florida, Ohio, and Virginia), and he still would've won 272-266.
-kos
The difference between the margin in Colorado and the national margin is 1.5%.
5.4 - 3.9 = 1.5
If Romney had won nationwide by 1% (some 1.3 million votes), he still would have lost Colorado and the election. The outrage.
There's a simple solution to this little quandary though. Per the Constitution, individual states decide how they allocate their electoral college votes. Your state can pass a National Popular Vote law, giving its electoral college votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote.
Don't worry; the law only goes into effect when states with at least 270 electoral college votes have passed it, and it's an interstate compact. So far, states with 138 electoral college votes have already passed the legislation into law*. We're half way there.
-- Perhaps this logic could move some of your state's legislators into support --
If your state has not yet passed its National Popular Vote law, please take a minute to encourage your local representatives to support it in the new year. Here's the website for the National Popular Vote movement, and here's state-by-state info on progress to date.
* The states with a NPV law are New Jersey, California, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington and Vermont.