Sorry Ohio ... Colorado Was the Key State in 2012

It turns out Colorado was the tipping point state, not Ohio, in 2012. What do I mean by this?

I took all the states and listed them in the chart below in descending order by the size of Obama's margin of victory (or loss).

Of course, most of the states on the edges are irrelevant to this story so let's drill down to look at the states that Obama won or lost by 10 point or less.

It may not look like it but there is so much worthy of discussion here. First, notice that Obama did better nationally than he did in Ohio. This was not true in much of the pre-election polling and represented a moderate surprise to me. The final pre-election polling average on Pollster had Obama up by 1.5% nationally but up by 3.4% in Ohio. PPP's final national poll had Obama up by 2 but up by 5 in Ohio. There was much discussion in the final days of the campaign that the Romney campaign did not see an easy path in Ohio and that explained the last-minute (and futile) effort in Pennsylvania. But Ohio really was reasonably close.

Don't get me wrong here. That 1.9% victory is not tiny. Remember that Ohio was so saturated with campaign visits and campaign ads that it was probably going to be very, very difficult for Romney to move enough voters to win there. But it was a little bit closer than we thought it would be.

Second, notice that the three closest states Obama won were, as Chuck Todd likes to call them, "FLOHVA." And they were in that order - Florida, then Ohio, then Virginia. Chuck Todd talked a lot about how the election was going to come down to these three important states. I certainly agreed but figured that Florida was kind of irrelevant because, if Obama won Florida, he would already have won Ohio and would already have the 270 he needed. I was right about that latter part but was wrong that ... Obama didn't turn out to need Ohio either. Or Virginia. Wow.

And this brings me to, what is to me, the most interesting point. Colorado was the key "tipping point" state (Nate Silver's terminology), not Ohio. In arguing that Romney was wasting his time in Pennsylvania, I pointed out that the leads Obama had in Ohio and Virginia were so critical that

he can lose Florida, Pennsylvania, and hell, let's give Romney Colorado too. It is still an Obama victory.

But, of course, Obama was never going to lose Pennsylvania. So, when you give Pennsylvania to Obama, it turned out that Obama didn't need Ohio or Florida or Virginia.

Obama finished with 332 electoral votes. But some of these states were close. If Obama lost Florida (29 electoral votes) and Ohio (18 electoral votes) and Virginia (13 electoral votes) - a complete sweep of FLOHVA - he would still have had 272 electoral votes ... because of Colorado. Colorado is the state that won it for Obama.

And here's the interesting thing about that. Obama won Colorado by 4.7 points. Imagine for a moment that the states all shift equally as the national margin moves. This is not quite true but is not a crazy approximation of reality. If this were true, you could move the national vote 4.6 points in Romney's direction and Romney would still lose. You would be moving from a +2.7 Obama margin to a 1.9-point margin for Romney ... and Romney would still lose.

For most of the 2012 campaign, Colorado was thought of as a sort of safety-valve swing state. It was not given as much attention because the Obama campaign knew they win if they win Ohio. And, while that was true, it was also true the Obama campaign was winning without Ohio. Colorado was the true tipping point state.

When you start to meditate on that reality and then think about what drove Obama to victory in Colorado, you start to realize the trouble the Republican Party is in at the national level.

There Are Facts

It turns out the polling was accurate all along. Amazingly accurate as it happens.

As I wrote on Sunday, the polls were unequivocal. The only chance Romney had to win was if the polls were somehow displaying some kind systemic polling bias. I explained that that was possible even if it was not likely. Not likely was right. The polls were just right on the mark.

As a side note, not that I'm out for anyone losing their livelihood or something, but I do think there should be some accountability for some of the pundits that were just silly, silly wrong. For goodness sake, take Dick Morris off the air. Seth Masket is right about Peggy Noonan.

Anyone (including the Romney campaign) who considers Pennsylvania to be a swing state should be shut out of the discourse. They're not living in the fact-based world. I continue to defy anyone to show me something insightful Mark Halperin has said. Gallup Poll meet lack of credibility. Lack of credibility, this is the Gallup Poll.

There are facts. Thank goodness.

Election Day Prediction

Here's my best guess on the final outcome ...

Obama 332 - Romney 206.

Florida is the toughest call of all for me. I am basing my call in part on this brief discussion about Florida from Chuck Todd's Daily Rundown on Saturday:

Chuck points out that the Obama campaign thinks they need to be about 160,000 - 200,000 votes ahead (Dem. reg. vs. GOP reg.) in the early vote by Election Day in order to win Florida. Adam Smith had pointed out they are just over 100,000 ahead on Saturday and it looks like they will fall short of their goal. But where are they today? The Miami Herald reports that Dems are now about 167,000 votes ahead ... in a report posted at 11AM on Monday. They're right in that zone that Chuck Todd suggested they needed to be. Florida is going to be close. But I'll bet on the Obama turnout machine to carry him over the line.

Regardless, the map above does not make Florida a must-win for Obama. I am pretty confident about Ohio at this point. I think Romney's last-minute Pennsylvania gambit was the white flag of surrender in Ohio. But hey, you want to see how strong Obama's position is with Ohio? Let's take the map above and assume I'm wrong about Florida (decent chance) and I'm wrong about Virginia (smaller chance). And then assume I'm wrong about ... Pennsylvania (not a chance!). Without Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania ... Obama wins with 270 electoral votes. At that point, Romney would still need to win some other Obama state.

No wonder Nate Silver's final run of his model has Obama as a 92% bet to win. Sam Wang says Nate is too conservative. He gives Obama a 98.2% chance of victory.

That's 1.8% of pure scary.

Why Watch the Popular Vote?

The Electoral College elects the president and we all know Obama has an advantage there. But Nate Silver provides a layman's approach to the popular vote for election night.

Put Silver's current Electoral College estimate (Obama is about 85% to win) together with that and what does it tell us? It tells us the national polls are starting to converge with where the state polls are. Silver points out that the 15% chance Romney has is almost all riding on the state polling displaying systemic bias. Now the national polling average is approaching a 1-point lead for Obama (currently +0.6 for Obama). This was not the case a week ago. So now, the national polls AND the state polls are indicating a likely Obama victory.

In the next 24 hours, we're going to see a bunch of final national polls released including Gallup and Pew. NBC/WSJ released their final national poll this morning and they have Obama up 48-47. Gallup being Gallup, they will likely have some outlier result based on their odd likely voter screen. Pew had the race even a week ago.

A week ago, the discussion was all about why the national polls and the state polls were so different. Now they are not as different. Romney NEEDS pollsters to be wrong at this point ... a lot of them.

UPDATE: Pew has their final poll out and Obama is up by 3.

Could It Be ...

... that Dick Morris is wrong??? Obama is winning right now ... and the polls seem to continue to move in his direction.



Here's Pollster.com's national poll chart ...



There are 7 national tracking polls. Obama now has a lead in 5 of them between 1 and 3 points and the other two are dead even. All of this is statistically insignificant but virtually every tracking poll has moved a point or two or three in Obama's direction in the last four days or so.

Sam Wang now estimates Romney's chances of winning the national popular vote as 6%. I won't tell you what Wang says are the odds of Romney winning the Electoral College as it would hurt Romney's feelings. But Nate Silver now estimates Romney's chances as just under 15%.

This is not a lock. It's just an awfully good hand that Obama is holding right now.

What You Should Worry About

The election is close and so everyone is nervous. Well, everyone except Dick Morris who is convinced that Romney will win in a landslide as Oregon is now in play (I'm not kidding).

Obama is leading according to the polls. It is roughly tied in the national poll averages and Obama has clear leads in the polling averages in enough swing states to put him over the top for re-election.

So, if you're supporting the President, you have just two things to worry about:

1) Something changes
2) The polls are wrong

Are either or both of these things possible? Absolutely. Are they likely? No. But let's take a closer look at each possibility.

Something changes. What could change in the final days? Some argue that nothing is going to change. Sam Wang, for instance, points out that the cake is now fully baked. He provides statistical proof for this and I find the phrase oddly compelling so I figured I'd repeat it. But it is always possible something could change. For one, a jobs report is going to be released in a few hours. Economists expect that the unemployment rate will tick up to 7.9%. That's probably not enough to damage Obama significantly. But it is an awfully close race and what if it ticks up to 8.0%? Are the optics of that sufficiently bad to do damage? Doubtful, but possible. (UPDATE: The jobs report was better than expected with 171,000 jobs added but the unemployment rate did tick up to 7.9% as more workers re-entered the workforce). What about the so-called incumbency effect? Many (mostly Republicans) argue that most of the undecided voters will break for Mitt Rommey because if they were voting for the President, they'd have been with him already. Is this likely? No. Mark Blumenthal picks that argument apart pretty well.

What about some other wildcard? Hurricane Sandy seems like the last, biggest wildcard and that does not seem to have done any damage to President Obama. Arguably, it has made him look good. Mitt Romney seems to think Pennsylvania is in play and he's headed there for a campaign stop on Sunday. Don't get me started on that. Overall, I think the jobs report is Romney's best bet in this category.

The polls are wrong. The polling data is much more clear than it appears to the naked eye. Sam Wang, Simon Jackman, Nate Silver, Drew Linzer, and others have modeled the probability that Obama does, in fact, have a lead according to the polls and the general consensus is ... "YEAH." But the key phrase in all that is "according to the polls." If the polls are all systematically biased in some similar kind of way, that lead would be a mirage. How often does this happen? Not often. But it is important to remember that polling is at least partially an art. In this era of low response rates, it is not quite as easy as before to ensure you have an unbiased sample. If Obama's lead (and he DOES lead in the key state of Ohio in the polls) were bigger, this would be less of a concern. But it is a small lead.

Of course, the possibility of error goes in both directions. If you watched the video of Stan Greenberg I posted a few days ago, you know there are those who believe the pollsters are undersampling Obama voters. In addition, the Obama campaign claims their superior ground game will help them out-perform the polls. Of course, the Romney campaign claims the same things. The reality is that pollsters are smart people and have staked their reputation on what they're doing. The odds are they are right. Systemic polling failure is possible ... but unlikely.

In the end, there is enough uncertainty to worry about both of these things: Something could change. The polls could be wrong. How much should you worry? As of tonight, Nate Silver has Obama as an 81% bet to win.

That's a high point in the post-Denver (first debate) campaign for Obama. And as Nate points out, you'd rather be holding Obama's cards right now than Romney's.

National Tracking Polls vs. Full National Polls

A few days ago, I asked, "where are the national polls?" Many have pointed out that the national polls and state polls seem to be saying different things and I suggested that one possible explanation for the difference is that we weren't seeing many full national polls at all. Instead, we were awash in national tracking polls. And I questioned whether there is some difference between these full national polls and the tracking polls that could explain the disconnect between state polls and national polls.

Since then, several full national polls have come out. Let's compare these full national polls with the national tracking polls to see if they tell us something different. I've listed the last 20 national polls (full or tracking) below with the most recent dates in the field on top.

The differences here are not quite as large as they might appear at first ... but there does seem to be a little bit of a difference. If we just take a straight average of the polls on each side of the ledger, Romney leads by an average of 1.1 among the tracking polls and Obama leads by an average of 1.0 on the full national polls. But this is mostly because of a few outliers on each side. Let's throw out the biggest outlier on each side (Gallup among the national tracking polls and National Journal among the full national polls). What do we get then? Among the tracking polls, Romney still leads by 0.6 points on average and, among the full national polls, Obama leads by 0.2 points. It is a 0.8% difference.

That's not a lot but it is something. More notable than that to me is that Obama does not trail in any full national poll. It does seem to me there's something different happening with the tracking polls. If we look at just the full national polls, the split between the national vote and the state polling is just a little less large.

You probably saw that Nate Silver discussed the differences between the state polling and the national polls in a post earlier today. In that piece, he does not consider the issue I'm raising here and expresses some rationale for why he throws his lot in with the state polling. Whether what I'm talking about is a part of this story or not, Silver's argument is a good one and is good reason to think the state polling is more to be believed. But this piece may get us a small distance towards reconciling the two.

Rasmussen, Systemic Polling Failure, and "Truth"

There's quite a brouhaha spinning around the interwebs with conservatives complaining that Nate Silver is cooking the books in his polling model because he's a liberal shill. Here's the argument in its original full form. It is pure drivel. Silver himself had this brilliant retort today ...

But, anyway, the whole thing got me to thinking about the state of the polls and the state of the race. Conservatives are reading Rasmussen and Gravis and Gallup and celebrating what is sure to be a big victory for Romney next Tuesday. Liberals are reading ... well, everything else and are sweating the national vote polls that have it close (actually, if you take Gallup and Rasmussen out of the naional poll averages, Obama is very slightly ahead) but feeling pretty comfortable about the state-level polls that show Obama leading in more than enough states to win a majority in the Electoral College.

What is the state of the race and whose polls are right? The truth is we don't really know for sure which set of polls is right. But, if I had to bet, I'd say Rasmussen and Gallup are wrong (for different reasons). Let me lay out the case for each side and explain why I think Rasmussen has it wrong but it is important to acknowledge that ...

Rasmussen could be right. Rasmussen has been identified as a pollster that has a "Republican lean" but this is really a mislabeling of what they are doing. It suggests that the pollster is just putting his thumb on the scale and cooking the books. That's not what Rasmussen is doing. At least I'm pretty sure they're not. What Rasmussen does is to use "dynamic party weighting." They weight their sample of voters so that they get to a designated number of Republicans and Democrats in their sample. The party weighting is "dynamic" because Rasmussen comes up with the relative weights of Republicans and Democrats based on some recent previous period of polling. Effectively, Rasmussen is making an educated guess about what the partisan makeup of the electorate will be (nationally or in a state) and then they make sure their sample looks like that.

So is it possible Rasmussen is right? Absolutely, it is possible. If their dynamic weights are accurate, then their polls will be accurate. And the flipside is also true. If their weights are wrong, they'll be wrong.

So what's the case against Rasmussen? A couple of days ago, Nate Cohn wrote that, if the polls stay where they are up to Election Day, Mitt Romney's only hope will be "systemic polling failure." This means that the vast majority of polls must have done something (question wording, poor sampling, etc.) that led them all to the wrong answer. Nate Cohn is right about this.

Systemic polling failure does happen. To understand why it is unlikely, we have to understand what other pollsters are doing differently than Rasmussen to get such systematically different results. First, other pollsters are not weighting by party ID at all. To most pollsters, party ID is something to be discovered in a poll, not something to use to weight the sample. This is because party ID is a fluid construct. People tend to change their response to a party ID question based on how they feel about the competing presidential candidates or based on how enthused they are to vote for their preferred candidate. Other pollsters simply ask respondents who they are planning to vote for and then use likely voter screens (of different varieties) to determine who is likely to vote and who is a non-voter.

It is entirely possible that this methodology will lead to a sample that is not reflective of the population as a whole. One reason is simply statistical variation. Maybe you just happened to get a disproportionate number of Romney supporters in your sample. This happens but we know the precise likelihood it will happen and this problem is corrected for by the various polling averages out there. Only a very small number of polls will be outliers for this reason and, when they are averaged into the rest, they will not have a substantial effect on the overall average number. A second problem is some kind of problem with the way we are sampling. One problem along these lines is the undersampling of certain kinds of populations like cell phone users or Hispanic voters who do not speak English, either of which may not be called by pollsters for different reasons. Some pollsters do call cell phones and some call Spanish-only voters. Here's Stan Greenberg talking about why undersampling of cell phone voters is causing Obama voters to be under-represented in the public polls we see:



Other pollsters who are good at what they do, use some kind of weighting mechanism to try to get a representative sample without calling them. This is increasingly problematic but is done well by some pollsters (like PPP in my view).

The point is that these pollsters are either getting a truly representative sample or they are using demographic weighting (not partisan ID weighting) to make sure they don't have a problem with their sample. The fact that so many pollsters are coming to basically the same conclusions (for instance, that Barack Obama has a small lead in Ohio) is evidence that they are likely right.

Could Ohio (and other states) still shift? Yes, but it is getting very late.

Could Rasmussen be right and the other polls wrong? Yes. I don't think so but it could happen and, if it did, it would be exactly the kind of "systemic polling failure" Nate Cohn was talking about.

We'll know next Wednesday morning.

Where are the National Polls?

We all see the divergence between the national tracking polls, which generally show Romney with a small lead on average, and the state-level polls, which generally show Obama with small leads in most of the key swing states on average.

How could these two things be true at the same time? There's actually two things going on here:

First, it is entirely possible that the President is winning by narrow margins in swing states like Ohio and Colorado but is losing by more in "solid Romney" states than he is winning in "solid Obama" states. That would translate into a national popular vote deficit but, potentially, an Electoral College victory. Most of the sites that create election-prediction models like Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium and Drew Linzer's Votamatic use state-level polls either exclusively or more heavily than national polls because the state-level polls provide more information that is useful. They are generally right to do this in terms of predicting what matters - the Electoral College outcome. But those national tracking polls are still unpleasant to look at ... which brings me to my second point ...

Second, it is really striking to me how few "full" national polls there have been in this campaign, especially in the final weeks of the campaign. There are at least 8 different national "tracking" polls that are released just about every day. But these are not the same as a regular poll. I can't claim perfect expertise on the impact (or not) of this phenomenon but it does seem to me there is some important effect of looking at only tracking polls as opposed to regular "full" national polls. Tracking polls take a smaller sample every night for 3 or 4 or 5 or even 7 (in the case of Gallup) nights. They put these together to create a national polling number. Then, when a new night comes on board, the sample from the oldest night drops out. What you end up with is a "rolling average" of the most recent nights. One potentially problematic aspect of this is that, because each night is a distinct sample and because the pollster wants to keep the demographics in the full sample correct from night to night, you have to weight some very small samples night to night before adding them to the sample. This would seem to introduce some error as opposed to doing a regular 2 or 3-night poll and then weighting the whole sample from there. In effect, you'd need to do less weighting as you'd have stronger sub-samples to work with.

Now, I'm just kind of spit-balling on all that and I could be wrong. But I do think that regardless, it is notable that there have been so few full national polls. Indeed, there has not been one full national poll that I can find since the third debate. I'd be interested to see one of those from a good pollster who does live interviews with cell phones included.

UPDATE: In a post today, Nate Silver speaks to the question of the split between the national tracking polls and the state-level polling. The bottom line is that he says the state-level numbers are suggesting leads for Obama in swing states like Ohio that are statistically very meaningful. Mark Blumenthal makes some similar arguments in Pollster.com

Grab Your Magnifying Glass and Take a Look

It was a very solid polling day for Obama and I think I see little green shoots of a tiny Obama bounce coming off of the 3rd debate. The evidence is limited but it is in enough places that it seems real.

PPP's tracker put Obama ahead 49-48 and PPP's Tom Jensen pointed out:

Four polls came out looking at likely voters in Ohio today. Rasmussen had it tied at 48. The other three had Obama up by 2, 3, and 5 points respectively. The poll that had Obama up by 5 (Time) was conducted on the 22nd and 23rd, the night of the debate and the night after.

Two polls were released today looking at Virginia and both had Obama leading (though both are questionable for different reasons). Two polls were released today looking at Nevada and Obama was leading in both. One was Rasmussen and one was PPP. Obama is leading in Nevada folks.

Finally, the Gallup tracker lurched back towards Obama today. I discussed (and largely dismissed) this earlier. But, in the context of these other polls, it may be a sign of a little bit of movement.

Were there any counter indicators today? To put that another way, what were the worst numbers for Obama in any polls released today? There was a Rasmussen poll that had Obama down 2 in New Hampshire (though there was another poll that had Obama up by 3 there). ABC/WP didn't budge today and Romney leads by 1 nationally in their poll ... and that's about it. Those are the good numbers for Romney today.

Put all that together and mix until you see a "sticky" consistency and what do you get?

It is one day. And it isn't a big move towards Obama. It is very small actually. Most importantly, everything I describe above could VERY easily be statistical noise. We'll know more tomorrow. But it was about as good a day of polling as Obama has had since before the first debate.

Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio ... Oh My

There's a lot of good articles floating around in the last couple of days about how close the national polls are and how President Obama has an advantage in the state level polling in swing states. A particularly good piece was posted on Huffington Post by Simon Jackman of Stanford outlining a statistical model of both the present national vote/EV split and the history of this split (statistically-speaking).

It got me to thinking about how to express Obama's advantage in the simplest terms, so here it is: Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio.

Now let me flesh that out a bit. Take a look at the map below. It shows what I believe to be the state of the race in the most general terms.

Every red state and blue state on the map is highly likely to go to Romney (red) or Obama (blue). Put another way, I don't think there is a single red or blue state on that map that any reasonable person would dispute.

Obama has 237 electoral votes effectively "in the bank" and Romney has 191. There are 9 "battleground" states totalling 110 electoral votes. I've ranked these 9 battleground states below in order of their probability of going for Obama according to Nate Silver's blog:

WI - 79.0%
NV - 73.1%
OH - 70.3%
IA - 65.9%
NH - 62.6%
CO - 52.9%
VA - 46.9%
FL - 32.6%
NC - 15.0%

Notice the three at the top of the list; Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio. By the way, Drew Linzer also estimates that Obama would win these three states today predicting the President would get 51.7%, 52.0%, and 51.1% respectively in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

Now you can see why I've been saying since ... forever ... that Ohio is the whole ballgame. Let's assume Obama wins the three of those battlegrounds he's most likely to win; Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio. Here's the new map:

Obama is now at 271, 1 more than what he needs to win. It isn't just that he needs 3 states out of 9. It is that he needs the 3 states that he's most likely to win. Unless Romney can pick off at least one of these states, he can't win.

Let's Say Rasmussen is Right

Rasmussen is not a terrible pollster but you have to understand what Rasmussen is doing in order to interpret their results.

First, Rasmussen is a robo-pollster. They don't do live-interviewer polls and this means they also don't call cell phones. This is one reason why Rasmussen has a bit of a Republican lean. In general, Nate Silver has argued Rasmussen has about a 2-point Republican lean. Their national tracking poll currently has Romney ahead by 1 point (49/48). So, a 2-point lean would put Rasmussen right about where some other national polls are.

Second, Rasmussen weights by party ID. This has two implications for how we read their polls. First, Rasmussen's polls are going to be less volatile than other polls. When something happens that changes public attitudes about the race, poll respondents don't just change their response on which candidate they support. They also sometimes change their response on their party identification. If you have a fixed number of Republicans and Democrats you're looking for in your poll, you are not going to pick up that shift even though it is real.

How does this play out? Since late September, most pollsters have shown a shift towards Romney in the national polls and, more recently, a tiny shift back towards Obama. Rasmussen's national tracking poll has remained within a very narrow range between Obama ahead by 2 and Romney ahead by 2. For the last couple of weeks, Rasmussen's tracker has been within an even more narrow range between a tied race and Romney ahead by 2. These same things are true at the state level as well: Rasmussen polling is very stable and has a slight Republican lean.

So, let's say all of Rasmussen's polls are right. Who wins? It looks like Obama wins.

Rasmussen's "Electoral College Scoreboard" has Obama ahead in states totalling 237 electoral votes and Romney ahead in states totalling 235 electoral votes. 7 states are listed as tossups. But Rasmussen has done polling in these tossup states (very recently in most of them). Here's what those numbers show:

CO - Obama +1
IA - Obama +2
NH - Obama +1
NV - Obama +3
OH - Obama +1
VA - Romney +3
WI - Obama +2

All of these polls are very close but Obama is winning in more than enough of them that if Rasmussen is right, Obama wins. If Nate Silver's arguments about Rasmussen's lean is right, Obama wins a bit more handily.

Again, we come to the same place: Is it close? Yeah. Is Obama winning right now? Yeah.

State-Level Polling

More evidence of trouble with that Gallup poll comes in the form of state-level polling that is WAY out of whack with Gallup's national numbers. This afternoon, NBC/WSJ/Marist released two state-level polls that are VERY bad for Romney. The President leads in Iowa by 8 and in Wisconsin by 6. Folks, there are two possibilities on these numbers:

1) They're wrong
2) Romney is in very deep trouble

It is entirely possible they're wrong. I would actually be surprised if Obama was ahead by 8 in Iowa right now. I do think he's ahead in both of these states but my guess would have been something more like 4-5 points in Wisconsin and perhaps a little less in Iowa.

If these polls are accurate, here's why Romney's in trouble:

1) States don't usually move by themselves. They reflect national trends a lot of the time. If Obama is ahead by 8 in Wisconsin, he's winning by something like 4-6 points in Ohio and he's winning in Virginia and so on.

2) If the Obama campaign knows they have leads like that in those states, they can move at least some of their resources from those states towards Florida and Ohio and Virginia, etc.

3) Obama's lead is the same in Iowa as it was a month ago. There has been no movement or whatever movement there has been has cancelled itself out. Obama was winning in September and this would mean he's winning now.

4) Early voting appears to be as big a disaster for Romney in Iowa and Wisconsin as it is in Ohio. 34% of likely voters in Iowa say they've already voted and Obama is winning among these voters 67-32. The poll reports that Romney is winning among likely voters planning to vote on Election Day but not by nearly enough. Similarly, 156% of likely voters in Wisconsin say they've already voted and Obama is winning there 64-35. But the race is about even there among those planning to vote on Election Day. So, Obama appears to be winning right now in these states and locking in large numbers of votes right now.

Anyway, coming back to that Gallup Poll, the situation is simple: The two sets of numbers (Gallup and NBC/WSJ) are not consistent or the result of statistical noise. Nate Silver agrees and advises that people "be careful" with the Gallup numbers.

There is something very different going on in the sampling and one of them (Gallup or NBC/WSJ) is just dead wrong. I don't think Gallup is right.

Watching Likely Voters

I've argued that the first debate did not so much convince any voters to vote differently as it charged up Republican voters and depressed Democratic voters. This shift has been reflected in the polling as the composition of likely voters has changed just slightly. Of course, slight changes in the composition of likely voters are huge. So, I don't mean to downplay the shift. But I do want to point out that there are two things that potentially work in the President's favor if Romney is banking on a favorable likely voter pool to put him over the top:

1) The difference between likely voters and registered voters is unusually large right now and I think it is likely to shrink. It won't be zero. Romney will get a boost mainly because of demographics. Older people support Romney and younger people support Obama. Older people are more likely to vote. This is the biggest reason for Romney's advantage among likely voters but there are others. But likely voter numbers are a prediction that can change, especially if the President is able to un-do some of the damage done by the first debate. I think Democrats are a bit more enthused after the VP debate. If the President has a better night on Tuesday night, there is every chance the media narrative will be about how Obama "came back," etc. That will fire up the Democratic base and those likely voter numbers might get better.

2) The Obama campaign has been banking on their GOTV operation and they argue it will translate into a real advantage in a close race on Election Night. Nobody knows for sure whether this is real. But we're starting to see some very limited evidence consistent with the Obama narrative. Michael McDonald, who is the authoritative word on early voting, breaks down some of the early voting numbers here. The short version is that it does appear the Obama campaign is outperforming the Romney campaign on early voting, at least in some battleground states. This evidence is supplemented, of course, by the early voting numbers in a couple of polls in Ohio. NBC/WSJ and PPP have both polled Ohio in recent days and both break out early voting numbers. As of yesterday, PPP found that 19% of respondents said they had already voted and these respondents reported going for Obama by a staggering 76/24 margin. Just a few days earlier, NBC/WSJ found that 18% of respondents in Ohio said they had already voted and this group broke for the President 63/37.

Nate Silver finds this mix of early voting data and likely voter findings in polls to be difficult to reconcile and I agree. Silver tweeted this out yesterday:

There's too little data at this point to tell whether the early voting data or the likely voter polling data paints more of an accurate picture of the two campaigns' GOTV efforts. But, as Silver points out, if the gap between likely voters and registered voters closes some, Obama will win.

Have Voters Changed Their Minds About Obama?

No. That's the short answer.

Much of the criticism of the Pew Poll leveled from despairing Democrats has centered on the partisan makeup of the poll. 36% of likely voters in the poll self-identified as Republicans while 33% self-identified as Democrats. Democrats charge that in 2008 exit polls, 39% of voters self-identified as Democrats compared to 32% who self-identified as Republicans and in 2004 (when Democrats lost a close race), Democrats and Republicans each made up 37% of the electorate. So what gives Pew?

The fact is that the Pew poll is a really well-run poll and there is probably nothing significant wrong with their sampling. As Nate Silver has pointed out many times, party identification is a fluid thing and is more a reflection of where the electorate is at any point than a determinant of where the electorate is. And this brings me to my point.

Romney's post-debate surge is driven by enthusiasm among Republicans (and despair among Democrats) rather than voters changing their minds about the President. More Republicans say they're definitely voting now than before and more voters are willing to say they're Republicans than before. These "new" Republicans have been with Romney all along but were less sure about voting and were less willing to call themselves Republicans. Romney's debate performance energized them and reinvigorated their Republican-ness.

We can see this is the case by looking at some other polls. Gallup has started to release likely voter poll numbers in addition to their registered voter numbers. There is a 5-point swing towards Romney when we move from registered voters to likely voters. That's a BIG swing and it is explained by greater enthusiasm among Republicans. But, what's interesting is that when Gallup breaks out their polling over the last seven days, we see this:

Among registered voters, Obama's standing appears not to have eroded at all. Indeed, Gallup has Obama at a 53% job approval rating, slightly higher than it was before the debate.

We see something similar (from a different angle) looking at the Rasmussen poll. Rasmussen weights their sample by party ID. This means their poll has a consistent number of Democrats and Republicans across time. Not surprisingly, Rasmussen's poll has hardly moved since the debate. It has ranged from Obama ahead 49-47 to Romney ahead 49-47 over the last 10 days. This could be seen as mere statistical noise rather than the effect of a "devastating" (Sullivan's words) debate performance by Obama.

Now, I'm not trying to say that all of this increased enthusiasm among Republicans and depression among Democrats is not a problem for the President. But I am saying that people (I'm looking at you Sullivan) need to be careful about interpreting what's happening as a bunch of undecided voters or a bunch of Obama voters suddenly deciding to vote for Mitt Romney.

The lesson of what I'm saying is that the Obama campaign needs to rally its base. That can be done and the best place to start is with better debate performances from the President and the Vice President that re-energizes Democratic voters. I expect that's going to happen starting with Thursday night.

Obama Bouncing

It appears my prediction of a very modest to zero bounce was incorrect.

Obama now leads by 4 points in the Gallup and Reuters tracking polls and by 2 in the Rasmussen tracking poll. That's a significant shift when you consider that some of the data in these tracking polls is still from before Obama's speech.

Nate Silver estimates this means Obama has been running about 7-9 points ahead nationally in the post-convention polling

Look, this is called a bounce for a reason. It bounces up and then comes back down. But sometimes it doesn't come all the way back down and you'd surely rather spend your time bouncing from up 1 or so to up 4 or 5 and back than bouncing the other way. And Nate Silver is at least suggesting the bounce could be bigger than a few points. We'll see. But it isn't zero or "very modest."

No Bounce?

It is awfully hard to discern a bounce in Romney's numbers. Lots of polling has been done in the few days since the GOP convention ended but there's not much there there as Mark Blumenthal points out.

Let me posit a few theories as to why this is:

1) The GOP Convention was a flop. Perhaps there's no bounce because the convention just didn't go well (see Eastwood, Clint). I don't think the convention went particularly well so this is at least part of the explanation. I was somewhat surprised to see some rave reviews for Romney's speech, even on MSNBC. I didn't think it was bad. It just wasn't very memorable in any respect.

2) Having the conventions back to back like this with Labor Day Weekend in between mutes the impact of both. I think this is part of the story. In addition, the DNC had a rapid response team at the GOP Convention and the GOP will do the same in Charlotte. The conventions do not dominate the media space or even the tv space the same way they once did (see #3) and, in short, they are right on top of each other canceling each other out.

3) Conventions are simply non-events and the public has caught on. If we take the view from 30,000 feet for a moment, it is important to remember that conventions were actually newsworthy events just about 4 decades ago. In 1968, there was plenty to cover when nominations were at stake. Even in 1976 and 1980, there was drama over the VP nod (Republicans in 1976) and over the Kennedy/Carter kerfuffle (1980). Since then, conventions have really been staged commercials. For a couple of decades, people tuned in thinking they might see something (a la 1980 or 1968). But then the number of channels available exploded as did the various modes of delivery after Al Gore graciously invented the world wide interweb (a series of tubes). So, two things have combined to end the convention's dominance of media. We've all caught on that there's nothing really happening and we've all got lots of other things to watch and do now. In short, we can watch a 3-day infomercial - "3 days to stronger Abs!!!" - or we can watch something that is important - baseball. Now, it is true that even those watching find out what happened (through a media filter mind you) in the couple of days after the convention by hearing about it, reading about it, etc. But they tend to see very small snippets like the big gaffe (see Eastwood, Clint) or the soaring moments (see ... ???).

I think all three of these theories have something useful to offer in explaining Romney's "little to no" bounce. But I think it is probably correct that #3 is the biggest piece of it. The only people tuning in are political junkies who've already made up their minds. Romney's performance (and the whole GOP for that matter) was fairly weak. But there really wasn't much of an opportunity for them to create a big bounce anyway.

UPDATE: Nate Silver has a piece out this morning that somewhat along the lines of the argument in #3. He says in part:

The three smallest bounces for the challenging candidates came in the last three elections. Bounces aren’t what they used to be, perhaps because voters are saturated with information months in advance of an election, increased partisanship and sterilized conventions that may have become too polished for their own good.

The catch is that each of these things is a structural factor, and therefore might predict that Mr. Obama won’t get much of a bounce either. Maybe this is just the new normal.

Larry Kudlow ...

... was disappointed with Mitt Romney's speech. And that pretty much sums it up.

It was a non-event and therefore a missed opportunity for Romney.

Larry Kudlow points out right after the speech that Mitt Romney is going to launch a "jobs tour" after he becomes president. Kudlow observed he didn't know what the heck that means. Answer: It doesn't mean anything. It is an empty platitude ... like the rest of the speech.

How big will the convention bounce be? 4-5 points is my guess and I think it will vanish faster than the usual bounce.

I think where we emerge in about 2 weeks (after both convention bounces fade) is Nate Silver's model showing Obama with a 72% chance of winning. Let's see if I'm right.

Movement?

A couple of days ago, Quinnipiac released polls in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania showing Obama with leads of 6, 6, and 11 points respectively among likely voters.

Yesterday, Pew Research Center released a national poll showing Obama with a whopping 10-point lead with Romney's unfavorables ticking up to 52%.

This morning, the monthly jobs report held moderately good news for Obama ... a gain of 163,000 jobs in July. We've said previously that averaging job gains of even 125,000 a month would probably be good enough for the President to get reelected.

Finally, Nate Silver's model has Obama's probability of winning ticking up a bit over 70% and that has not yet factored in the decent jobs report.

So, is there real movement in the race here or just statistical noise? Let's break down each piece of news here. The Quinnipiac polls are probably the most positive indicator in all this as they are a good pollster and the Ohio and Florida numbers are surprisingly strong for Obama (please don't get me started on Pennsylvania again). Quinnipiac has moved to a likely voter screen here though and, while that normally gives a slight bump to the Republicans, it could do almost anything depending on how they are screening likely voters. So, it is entirely possible there is no movement here at all and Obama's lead in Ohio and Florida in these polls is just a function of a bad likely voter screen. Similarly, it could be statistical noise though these polls had very large sample sizes (over 1,000 likely voters in each state).

The Pew poll shows a very large lead for Obama that is out of step with other polls. Pew has had a significant house effect towards Obama for some time now so the "lead" would need to be discounted some just for that reason alone. Nate Silver discussed this at length last night.

The jobs numbers are decent for Obama but not incredible. The new numbers basically stem the erosion of confidence in my view rather than boosting Obama. This is good news for Obama no doubt but it is not a "game-changer."

Taking all that together, I think it is fair to say it has been a good couple of days for Obama but "no movement" is a good day for him right now. He doesn't need the dynamic of the race to change. I am not sure we're seeing actual movement in any numbers here. We'll know more in a week or two but count me as one who believes the breaking news here is ... nothing, nothing is happening.

Simple Math

Mitt Romney seems intent on making the whole case for his candidacy on the economy's poor performance and on his (Romney's) superior qualifications and background in the private sector actor. Some problems:

1) The Obama campaign has been hammering Romney on his Bain years and it appears to be resonating with voters ... -1

2) People want to know that, even if Romney can fix the economy, he's credible as a foreign policy actor. He just returned from a trip that suggests otherwise ... -1

3) Many have criticized Romney for running strictly on his biography and failing to offer clear ideas for how he would fix the economy. But he has offered a tax plan. Brookings finds that Romney's tax plan would actually increase the tax burden for 95% of Americans while cutting taxes for the wealthiest 5% ... -1

So that's a negative 3. What effect has it had on the race? None, so far. The national polls don't show much movement. If anything, they show Romney closing just by a bit but nothing really. The state polls seem to be moving in favor of Obama if anything. But ... nothing really.

Then none of it matters, right? I wouldn't quite say that. All of this is laying a foundation for the race to come. It is setting the strategic environment. I guess we might say the ingredients for the cake are being gathered. So, while we don't know what the cake will look like, the chef is going to be constrained by what is in the kitchen and what's not.

Nate Silver's forecast has moved around very, very little since it was introduced. But, right now, it is near the high point for Obama's chances of winning - 69%. That sounds about right to me.