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.

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.

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

Post-Debate Panic Among Democrats

Most of my Democratic friends (which is most of my friends) are in full freak-out mode about Obama's debate performance. Some of these people value my opinion on these things. Some of them seek out my opinion not because they believe it but because they figure I'll give them the pro-Obama spin and they just want to be comforted. Still others don't ask me for my opinion because they think I'm an apologist for everything Obama's ever done. Whether you want my opinion or not, here it is:

Settle down people, settle down. Read what John Sides has to say. Or read what Sam Wang has to say.

These are smart people. Very ... professorial. When did THAT become a bad word???

Look, the only way Romney can gain ground is if he wins over some undecided voters or if he wins over some voters "leaning" towards Obama who are persuaded to move. There are VERY few undecided voters out there. If half of them made up their minds tonight (not likely) and those people break for Romney 5 to 1 (not likely) ... he picks up a net of about a point to a point and a half. How many of those "leaning" towards Obama changed their mind? Not a lot. Could Romney gain 2 points? It's possible but 1 point is a better bet.