Nothing brings on rape like pregnancy does 
I agree, generally speaking.
I guess you don’t understand probability. 2:1 odds means Obama has a 67% chance of winning, or the odds of rolling a 1,2,3, or 4 on a single die roll. That’s not exactly overwhelming.
And OBTW: Nate Silver’s model currently suggests that Obama is winning the popular vote 50.2 - 48.7. When the margin is that tight, you would expect some polls to favor Romney, others Obama. That’s why serious people look at all the data, properly weighted.
Frankly, I think partisan cheerleaders are most likely to look stupid after the election, depending upon which side happens to win. For myself, the odds I give Obama rises and falls with the 538 forecast: tonight Obama has 73%. Reverting 5 percentage points to the mean (rather than 10, it’s getting close to the election after all) gives an MfM forecast of a 68% chance of Democratic victory. In contrast, Dick Morris thinks that Romney will win by 4 or 5 percentage points. I doubt that and opine that those who watch him are extremely gullible.
Is Yahoo News doing Onion-style satire now? Nope, this one’s for real.
Meatloaf, possibly drunk, surprises the world by showing up on a Romney campaign stage, performing some deep cuts, and offering “meandering” endorsements of the Massachusetts Republican. Romney seems to have finally won the much-coveted strange celebrity performance artist demographic.
There’s a “put a fork in it” joke here somewhere.
Some more Meatloaf deliciousness from Politico:
Yeah, Mitt, I’m pretty sure Meatloaf didn’t cancel any paying gigs for this one.
Romney had a slightly better day with the polls released later in the day especially the national polls. In particular the highly-regarded WaPo poll has moved in his direction along with a few other national polls and he had two +2 polls in Virginia. Still my overall sense is that Obama has had the better of the swing state polling since the debate. He has +3 leads in 3 out of last 4 Colorado polls for example (with a tie in the other).
I think there are two basic questions the state polls can help us answer:
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How secure is Obama’s plan A to win the election?
Right now this involves Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada. It’s looking very solid with polls consistently showing Obama up by 2-4 points in these states. This Plan A looked quite solid even at Romney’s peak after the first debate which suggests a fair amount of resilience too. -
Does Obama have a credible plan B especially if he loses Ohio?
Before the first debate the answer was clearly yes but Obama lost clear leads in states like Virginia and Colorado which became tossups. However he has crept back up in both states especially Colorado.
Almost undoubtedly true, but poll averages and aggregates don’t show this right now.
Very few opinion polls in 2008 showed Obama receiving 53% until the last few days of the election (around 2 Nov, 08). Most polls include “undecided” as a category- but there are no undecided votes counted. So Silver uses poll averages and average margins to estimate the final vote count. He was extremely close in 2008, and I see little reason not to believe he’s close today. Keep in mind he relies heavily on the state polls, which really do show a small but consistent Obama lead in enough states (WI, OH, and NV, for example) to win 270 EVs.
More hope! Obama surges to 6 point lead in RAND poll!
Okay, either that’s a line from an Onion article or Mr. Loaf has a better sense of humor than I thought…
I am an Obama supporter. I had been assuming that Virginia and Colorado were the really important states this year, especially if we concede that Romney might very well win Ohio. After playing around with the numbers, I realized that this is correct, BUT it turns out that New Hampshire might be very important as well. If we find out rather early on election night that Romney is projected to win Ohio and Virginia, then Obama would quite likely need BOTH New Hampshire AND Colorado to win. Just Colorado won’t get him there. (But just Virginia would have.)
But Obama’s lead in OH is greater than in all those other states you mentioned. I don’t think WI and PA are really swing states. I think NV is very solidly in Obama’s column. That means if he wins OH, he has 270 EVs. And he’s got a steady, stable lead there.
That’s why so much of the focus is on OH.
The reason I don’t trust Ohioans is this article: “The Effects of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate: Using Google Search Data to Find What Surveys Miss,”by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard economics PhD candidate. The author astutely realized that people are more truthful about certain things (including racist or racial tendencies) within the anonymous world of Google than they are in traditional questionnaire surveys. The author concludes that Obama won in 2008 DESPITE about 4 percent of voters nationally voting against him purely due to his “race”.
The heartland for this sentiment is a region around where Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania meet. It’s interesting that such places tend to be where there is a specific percentage range of black residents. More than this, they tend to be accepted as a full part of society. Fewer than this, they tend to not cause much “concern.”
In general, I’m afraid that a lot of people will feel like four years ago they proved to themselves and to others that they can vote for a black man for president – but now that they’ve given themselves a pat on the back, they will go for the white guy, “all other things being equal”.
I hope I’m wrong.
If there is a 4% difference between polls and actual results Romney would win in a landslide.
Or an Obama win in a landslide.
True, but I think DigitalC was referring to my paraphrase of the article I just cited (although it should be noted that the 4% figure wasn’t specifically about the difference between pre-election polls and real voting – i.e., the “Bradley effect”.)
Ok. It’s possible, but if you compare the 2008 state resultswith 2008 state polling, you’ll find that in the swing states (which are most heavily polled), Obama consistently outperformed or was at the high end of the polling. This is generally attributed to a superior turnout operation, which by all accounts the Obama campaign has maintained and even improved.
Good point. But we can’t relax yet. That “turnout operation” might be going well so far, but it’s all for naught if each of us doesn’t put some effort (however small) into making it happen when it counts – namely, from this moment until Election Day.
(I won’t exhort anymore…I know this is sort of supposed to be a “just the facts, please” thread. Or is it? Whatever.)
I’m not relaxing! I voted (early) last week, but I’m still giving.
It is also worth noting that these polls are all likely voter polls, which are incredibly hard to gauge their accuracy, primarily because we don’t know what screen they use. There has been some argument the Registered voter polls actually perform better. If that is the case, than Obama has a healthy lead.
Yeah, I read something about this yesterday (maybe on 538, not sure) and the gist was that likely voter screens often leave out people that say they’ll “probably vote” or are “50/50”. The 50/50’s I can see leaving out, but if someone says they’ll probably vote, you should count them. When you look at the cross-tabs including the “probable voters”, the numbers look much better for Obama.
Yep. All (or most) of the “likely voter” models reduce the number of Democrats by a lot. We’ll see how accurate that assumption really is …
I will say this. People who think Obama voters aren’t as motivated and excited as they were in 2008 are flat out wrong.