Map Quest
Here we are at the weekend before the election. It's possible there'll be a slight shift in voter sentiment by Tuesday--and with a close race, a slight shift is all you need--but right now it looks like President Obama is going to be reelected. In fact, the most recent polls suggest he's stabilizing his support, or perhaps increasing it. (Some say Hurricane Sandy helped, as it allowed him to look like a powerful, committed leader in a non-controversial way while shoving a lot of other stuff off the front page. They also point to growing consumer confidence.)
I'm not saying it's a done deal, or even that it'll be that surprising if Romney takes it, but I can't ignore the polls. Right now, the two men are essentially tied in the nationwide popular vote, but if each takes the states he's leading in, Obama will win by a decent if not overwhelming margin in the Electoral College.
There are paths for Romney to get 270 Electoral votes, but not nearly as many as for Obama. (You can play along on this interactive map.) First, he pretty much has to win Virginia, Florida and North Carolina. He's got a decent chance at doing that, though it's hardly guaranteed. Assuming he takes them--and all the other states he's leading in--he'd still only have 248 Electoral votes, 22 short of victory (21 short of a tie!). Which means he'll have to take some states where Obama is presently leading.
Which ones? The state to watch, as just about everyone knows, is Ohio. Obama is consistently up over 2 percentage points there in polls. But if Romney can somehow manage it, he'd only be 4 Electoral votes away from victory, and thus would only need another small swing state--New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada or Colorado.
On the other hand, if he loses Ohio, there's not much hope. He'd have to take all four swing states mentioned above, or take a few of them along with a surprise state such as Michigan or Wisconsin. (Minnesota and Pennsylvania seem like longshots.)
There are some pundits confident Romney will win, but they all seem to be Republicans. I'm not saying that makes them wrong, but it's easy to succumb to false hope, or boosterism. Some of them note that Obama isn't doing nearly so well in early voting as he was four years ago (and why do we know that?). It's not a bad argument, but still, no one expects Obama to do as well as he did last time, they just expect him to win--he beat John McCain by 7% and nine-and-a-half million votes, so he can drop a fair amount and still finish first.
Aside from last-second shifts, there is one big unknown. No matter how good the pollsters are, they still have to base their results on expected turnout, and no one knows how that'll work. Once again, all it takes is for them to be wrong by a percentage point or two and all bets are off.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:02 AM
9 Comments:
Well, good for you. I only still wonder about two things. One is that, if it's all Republicans saying Romney has the advantage, isn't it all Democrats saying Obama does?
The bigger one, though, is that this has never been a socialist country, and it's hard to imagine that it is now. Even now Obama hedges, but he's the most overt socialist to ever campaign for the office. It will be a remarkable thing if he is validated.
Anon, I don't think Obama's victory validates or empowers Obama. The most likely outcome on Tuesday is things are virtually the same - the same Senate break down, the same House breakdown (give or take 5 seats), and the same President. It says 1) the country is split right down the middle, and 2) the electorate has no better answers than the politicians for what ails the country, so we are leaving bad enough alone.
It's not just Democrats saying Obama will win, it's the polls. That's the main point of this post. Unless the polls change, or are wrong, Obama wins.
The secondary point is things are close enough that it's not like four years ago when the election seemed to merely be a ratification of what we knew would happen. It's even possible some of the Republicans saying Romney will win have special inside knowledge, but then it's possbile the Democrats saying Obama will win do, too. I'm just going on what is publicly available.
Obama is winning because of commnets like Anon #1's. The deciding vote doesn't like crazies or extremists and Mitt sure seems like he's got more of them
Looking forward to catching up with you Tuesday, Anon.
LAGuy wrote: It's not just Democrats saying Obama will win, it's the polls. That's the main point of this post. Unless the polls change, or are wrong, Obama wins.
I halfway agree. Polls do not "say" anything, and pollsters do not report their raw polling data. They first scale each component of it. For example, if a pollster interviews 200 people, and it turns out that 115 of them are women -- and the pollster has reason to believe that 50% of the voters next Tuesday will be women -- then he rescales the 115 women and 85 men in his sample so that they are given equal weight.
This is perfectly legitimate and necessary. But it also means that the pollster must introduce data that comes from sources other than simply his poll.
Right now, national polls have consistently shown Romney just barely ahead (within the margin of error) and state polls show Obama with a solid lead. It's possible, of course, that Romney could win the popular vote and lose the electoral college, but Nate Silver has made a strong argument that the gap between national and state polls is very likely too large to be caused by that. More likely, one of them is wrong.
Reid Wilson makes a good argument that the discrepancy is caused by different assumptions about Hispanic and youth turnout. This is not a polling issue; these assumptions are used to scale the polling data. Nate Silver and the majority of "neutral" pollsters happen to share the same general estimates of voter turnout by group that the Democrats do. As Wilson points out, that's not because of their liberal bias. But it is nonetheless an assumption.
Fortunately, unlike almost every other major dispute in politics, the question of who's right will actually be revealed in five days. Which is nice, for a change!
Hmm. So this post amounts to, "The polls are right, unless they're wrong."
Talk about technical accuracy.
Off topic: I am astounded that during this entire campaign, Romney has never brought up Obama's handling of the oil spill in the Gulf.
I distinctly remember that it was the oil spill that caused several of my Democratic friends to decide that Obama was incompetent. They didn't wish McCain had won, but many of them wished it had been Hillary instead of Obama.
One of Romney's main themes is "Obama is a nice guy but he's in over his head." So why never mention the oil spill?
Many conservatives wish Romney had hit Obama on Benghazi. I think there are good arguments for that. But ultimately, Benghazi is something that makes conservatives mad at Obama. The oil spill made moderates and liberals mad at Obama, and so it would have been a very powerful tool to use. IMHO.
Romney has hit Obama pretty hard on not allowing as much drilling as he should. Perhaps Romney figures he can't hit him on the oil spill since so many liberals and moderates see Romney as a tool of big oil who will only allow them more leeway. It may seem silly, but that's how elections work. Look at Obama--his entire energy policy is built around the threat of climate change yet he hasn't brought up the issue once this time around since it's such a political loser.
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