If Obama appears wearing a bib, and starts drooling on it, that might sway some extra voters towards Romney 
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You don’t see any possible outcome that leads to a clear Romney lead?
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Honestly…no. Even a Carter-esque admission on live TV during the debate of a fascination with Playboy isn’t going to give Romney a clear and definite lead. I’ll be surprised if they are even neck and neck going into the election. I just don’t think Romney has what it’s going to take, given that despite a rather anemic economy Obama is still so popular. YMMV of course, but that’s how I see it right now.
Yeah, the irony quotient there was nearly off the charts. My guess is that the rationale there is that Romney is now seen, in right wing circles, as a real candidate and with real potential to win. Sort of like how a lot of left wingers look at Obama…maybe not the candidate they would choose, but one that’s close enough and has a realistic enough chance to win that they get interested in supporting him. I think that, as with left wingers, right wingers understand deep down that they will never get a guy they REALLY want in there. Maybe not Mr. (or Mrs.) Right…but at least Mr./Mrs. Right Now. 
Last I checked, Romney’s favoribility ratings were higher than Obama’s so…
Yeah, and the “Libya” thread here in Elections seems to have died out. I made a few posts today about recent reports regarding the role that the youtube video played in attacks, but the whole story seems to be off the radar now.
But not not necessarily in the swing states…
Certainly you are aware that the Libya story is almost exclusively a story in the right-wing echo chamber? On the rare occasions it gets mentioned outside of Fox News and talk radio it is when a Romney surrogate brings it up. After a brief discussion, the story goes away again. There’s just nothing to it, it’s a non-story.
What conservative positions did you see Romney change to more moderate ones during the debate? Did his tax plan change dramatically in that 90 minutes? Did he decide that he really does want to keep ObamaCare? I keep seeing references to stuff like “Romney moved to the center during the debate” and I wonder if we watched the same debate.
And I think the discussion on Romney vs Obama’s favorability rating were stemming from this Gallup poll:
Try googling “mitt Romney debates himself”, and check back.
I was actually hoping for a more substantive response to that question. For example, on taxes. Here’s what his website says. Did he contradict that during the debate?
He previously said his plan was to cut rates across the board by 20%. In the debate he said that number takes a backseat to how much money they can raise through eliminating deductions.
Since the whole criticism of the plan is that it relies on voodoo economics to make up the difference between reasonable cutting of loopholes and 20%, this is a pretty significant shift.
And even more directly, he said he wouldn’t lower taxes for the wealthy, having previously promised to do so in the primary.
The probability measure essentially provides the confidence interval. Obama is favored to win 285.6 electoral votes as of today. The odds of him winning fewer than 269 (and losing the election) are 36.2%. Or rather, that’s what the model predicts. There’s specification error to consider as well.[1] Sam Wang’s poll-only approach has tended to give Obama better odds, but I’ve been more sympathetic to Silver, who includes fundamentals in his model. This stuff is still an art though.
AFAIK, there’s no good way to attach a confidence interval to the probability measure. Well not quite. The confidence intervals around the electoral estimate are derived from 10,000 simulations. You could do that exercise 1000 times, say, and get a range of confidence intervals. But I don’t think it would be especially enlightening, as it wouldn’t capture specification error.
[1] One trivial source of specification error is that Obama’s and Romney’s odds appear to be constrained to sum to 100%. Not a big deal now, but in July you could argue that they should have summed to 99.7% or something.
Well, for example, he claimed that he will keep the provision that forbids insurance companies from not covering pre-existing conditions. However, whenever he says that, his campaign later has to walk away from it and admit that what he is saying is that he won’t repeal the law as it has been since 1996 (i.e., that if you maintain essentially continuous coverage then they can’t not cover pre-existing conditions).
Whether you want to call this a change in position or just a bald-faced lie may be a matter of debate. Given that he has done this multiple times now, the intelligent conclusion seems to be that it is the latter.
Basically, he is trying to purposely confuse voters about his position. Which lends further credence to what we already know from his long soliloquy in regards to the 47%: That he is a scumbag of the highest order.
If you Google the title of the post, you can get a direct link to the full article. If you come in directly from a Google link, the limit doesn’t apply.
This is actually true for any outside link. I have an RSS subscription specifically to 538, which allows me to visit each article without limit.
If he won’t lower their taxes, how are the job creators supposed to create jobs? Wasn’t that the narrative in the primaries?
I added fivethirtyeight to my google reader selection and that seems to get around the 10 article limit.