[Whitley]

Originally Posted by Stefan S

On the flip side, the Clintons were extremely loyal to Obama's administration. As a matter of reciprocity, Obama will help them. also, she will have Bill in her camp.

By the way, 4 years ago, her campaign was inept. They did not know the primary rules of their own part and were totally blown out of the waters by Obama's ground work. This time, I assume Obama's network would align behind Hilary. I know, a few assumptions there (like that Obama is reelected, and so on).

In her own words:

"I have been on this high wire of national and international politics and leadership for 20 years," Clinton said. "It has been an absolutely extraordinary personal honor and experience. But I really want to just have my own time back. I want to just be my own person. I'm looking forward to that."

Hillary Clinton: Repeats ‘no’ for 2016, can’t stand ‘whining’ about life choices – CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs

If then Sen. Clinton had admitted she had made a mistake by voting for giving President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq, then Obama would have never had the opening he used to first get traction in the primaries. However, her continual spin (I never knew he would actually use it) and refusing to admit the mistake killed her chances. I like Hillary and think she has done a lot to further the cause of women in politics.

She has served for twenty years, if President Obama is elected I can see her serving another couple years and then calling it good. She might have 20+ years left. I think the idea of just being Hillary Clinton is very appealing to her.

[hack]

If Hillary won't then Bill must.

[rpmfla]

Originally Posted by mn3

In the drive whoDean nuts department:

Obama moved up to 77.4% chance of winning the election. Ohio moves back to "likely Obama" with a 78% chance of winning that state, and Virginia moves to "lean Obama" with a 62% chance of winning that state. Iowa's at 74% Obama, and he's blowing out Romney in Michigan, Penn. and Minnesota.

Come on Florida! I live in Tampa which tends to vote slightly democratic, but I would love to see the state of Florida make up for (partially at least) the Bush/Gore debacle.

[tin mad dog]

I hope this thing shakes out well (by Obama winning) for America but I really can't wait for the damn thing to be over.

[mn3]

Very detailed article from whoDean so whoDean won't read it. Silver gives only 14% chance that whoDean will even read what I'm cut and pasting here. This post is all cut and paste, and I'm selecting some of the relevant stuff.

Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com

Oct. 30: What State Polls Suggest About the National Popular Vote

By NATE SILVER

Mitt Romney and President Obama remain roughly tied in national polls, while state polls are suggestive of a lead for Mr. Obama in the Electoral College. Most people take this to mean that there is a fairly good chance of a split outcome between the Electoral College and the popular vote, as we had in 2000. But the story may not be so simple

For both the swing state polls and the national polls to be right, something else has to give to make the math work. If Mr. Obama is performing well in swing states, but is only tied in the popular vote nationally, that means he must be underperforming in noncompetitive states.

But polls of noncompetitive states don’t always cooperate with the story.


... pretty much every method for evaluating the election based on state polls seems to hint at a very slight popular vote lead for Mr. Obama, along with an Electoral College one.
In the table below, I’ve listed the current forecasts at seven different Web sites that use state polls, sometimes along with a modicum of other information like a state’s past voting history, to produce predictions of the popular vote in each state.

The first of these sites is FiveThirtyEight. The others, in the order that they’re listed in the table, are Electoral-Vote.com; Votamatic, by the Emory University political scientist Drew Linzer; HuffPost Pollster; Real Clear Politics; Talking Points Memo’s PollTracker; and the Princeton Election Consortium, which is run by Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton. These are pretty much all the sites I’m aware of that use state polling data in a systematic way.

... You can see that the various projections strongly agree with another, for the most part, in making “calls” about individual states. The only state where different sites show different candidates ahead right now is Florida, where Talking Points Memo gives Mr. Obama a nominal 0.2-percentage point lead while the others (including FiveThirtyEight) have Mr. Romney slightly up instead. There are also four states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Virginia — in which some methods show an exactly tied race while others give Mr. Obama the lead.

Although I hope that this chart serves as a useful reference point — and as a reminder that other data-driven sites that look at the polls with the same philosophy that FiveThirtyEight applies are achieving largely the same results — I’m more interested in looking at this data in a macroscopic way.

Suppose, for example, that you take the consensus forecast in each state. (By “consensus” I just mean: the average of the different forecasts.) Then you weigh it based on what each state’s share of the overall turnout was in 2008, in order to produce an estimate of the national popular vote.

Do the math, and you’ll find that this implies that Mr. Obama leads nationally by 1.9 percentage points — by no means a safe advantage, but still a better result for him than what the national polls suggest.

What if turnout doesn’t look like it did in 2008? Instead, what if the share of the votes that each state contributed was the same as in 2004, a better Republican year?

That doesn’t help to break the discord between state and national polls, unfortunately. Mr. Obama would lead by two percentage points in the consensus forecast weighing the states by their 2004 turnout.

Or we can weigh the states by their turnout in 2010, a very good Republican year. But that doesn’t help, either: instead, Mr. Obama leads by 2.1 percentage points based on this method.

...

Mr. Obama’s lead in the Electoral College is modest, but also quite consistent across the different methods. The states in which every site has Mr. Obama leading make up 271 electoral votes — one more than the president needs to clinch victory. The states in which everyone has Mr. Romney ahead represent 206 electoral votes. That leaves five states, and 61 electoral votes, unaccounted for — but Mr. Obama would not need them if he prevails in the states where he is leading in the polls.

But perhaps national polls tell the right story of the race instead — meaning that the state polls systematically overrate Mr. Obama’s standing?

It’s certainly possible. (It keeps me up late at night.) If the polls in states like Ohio and Wisconsin are wrong, then FiveThirtyEight — and all of our competitors that build projections based on state polls — will not have a happy Nov. 6.
With that said, our decision to cast our lot mostly with the state polls is not arbitrary. In recent years, they’ve been a slightly more unbiased indicator of how the election will play out.

Bias, in a statistical sense, means missing consistently in one direction — for example, overrating the Republican’s performance across a number of different examples, or the Democrat’s. It is to be distinguished from the term accuracy, which refers to how close you come to the outcome in either direction. If our forecasts miss high on Mr. Obama’s vote share by 10 percentage points in Nevada, but miss low on it by 10 percentage points in Iowa, our forecasts won’t have been very accurate, but they also won’t have been biased since the misses were in opposite directions (they’ll just have been bad).
In a previous article, I examined the history of bias in public polls based on whether they’ve tended systematically to overrate the standing of the Democrat or the Republican. (The answer is that they don’t exhibit either bias on a consistent basis, as long as your using likely voter polls; registered voter polls will tend to overstate the vote for the Democrat.)

...
In recent elections — since state polling data became more robust — it’s the state polls that have done a bit better. This was especially so in 1996, when national polls implied a double-digit victory for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole (and Ross Perot) but state polls were more in line with the single-digit victory that he actually achieved. In 2000, state polls provided an accurate portrayal of a too-close-to-call race, while national polls missed high on George W. Bush vs. Al Gore.

There have been other years like 1992 in which the national polls did a bit better. But on average since that year, the state polls have had a bias of 1.1 percentage points — half as much as the national polls, which have had a 2.1-point bias instead.

We’re approaching the point where Mr. Romney may need the state polls to be systematically biased against him in order to win the Electoral College. And that certainly could turn out to be the case: if Mr. Romney wins the popular vote by more than about two percentage points, for example, he’ll be very likely to cobble together a winning electoral map, somehow and some way. (And he’ll be a virtual lock if the results are in line with Mr. Romney’s best national polls, like the Gallup survey, which put him four or five points ahead.)

But the historical evidence weighs in slightly more heavily on behalf of the state polls, in my view, when they seem to contradict the national ones. If the state polls are right, than Mr. Obama is not just the favorite in the Electoral College but probably also in the popular vote.

[mn3]

Justin WolfersEvery day that the game clock ticks down favors Obama. Latest odds: Betfair: 70%; Intrade 65%; IEM 64%; @fivethirtyeight 77% 31 minutes ago

[mn3]

PublicPolicyPollingA third of voters in Ohio say they've already cast their ballots, and Obama leads 62-35 with them: Obama leads 50-45 in Ohio - Public Policy Polling 9 minutes ago
PollTrackerOH President '12: Obama (D) 50.0% Romney (R) 45.0% (Oct. 30 - PPP (D)) Talking Points Memo 9 minutes ago

[mn3]

the 1 that demographic group which is historically proved to very hard for the pollsters to accurately represent is the LatinoA.D.

Silver and others like Latino Decisions have pointed this out and have pointed to how this tipped elections to the dems where the polls had shown them significantly behind. Harry Reid being just one example.

,

[tin mad dog]

Romney buys cans to give to people to donate back to him for photo op:

The Making Of Romney's Storm Relief Event

[Orwellian O.]

That "EVIL" Mittens!!! Trying to help people and all...totally in line with what he is done all his life....bastard!

[mn3]

The Red Cross won't take cans. They don't want clothes or blankets - since those have to be sprayed before given out. They want cash.

Romney's event was bullshit, and helped nobody affected by the storm. They probably, quietly because it's an embarrassement to the campaign, donated that stuff to a foodbank or a Goodwill.

[Orwellian O.]

Mittens is EVIL I tell you.

Him and his canned goods.

Everybody knows that hungry people don't eat canned goods.

How racist of him to think that may be of some help to somebody.

The 1% thinks all the 99% eat are canned goods!!! RACIST!!!

[tin mad dog]

If his intentions were to help people, he could have donated the cans himself, instead of making it a photo op.

[Jeff Hause]

FAQ | American Red Cross | Find Help, Make a Donation, Volunteer

"Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel."

He isn't evil. He's a dumbfuck.

[mn3]

The public is watching Obama perform brilliantly in this national emergency - so much so that Christy (Romney's chief surrogate and the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention) is praising the President continuously and effusively. The photo opp sessions are HR's for the President, even though it'd be really hard for him to swing and miss at this, effectively, political T-Ball.

The public is also watching Romney pretend to suspend his campaign, stage events that impede the valuable resources of the Red Cross, and generally appear small and insignficant in comparison.

Perceptions matter. Obama's likeability and his rating as President will, I bet, go up significantly for the next week or so - especially as the country comes to the aid of the millions of people deeply affected by this storm. That will translate into more votes for Obama, in a race where he already held the lead.

Romney is just getting killed by Sandy.

Edit:

PollingReport.comObama's overall response to this week’s hurricane: Excellent 35% / Good 42% / Not so good 4% / Poor 4% (ABC/WPost) http://t.co/xrWnRhBX 20 minutes ago

PollingReport.comRomney's overall response to the hurricane: Excellent 14% / Good 30% / Not so good 13%/ Poor 8%/ Unsure 35% (ABC/WPost) http://t.co/xrWnRhBX 18 minutes ago

[Orwellian O.]

How awful of Mittens. A man who has served as a bishop in his church (or cult to most Christians...or crazy nonsense club to non-mormons and believers of nothing).

A man who has personally presided over his congregation's charitable mission (i.e. he was the guy who helped people obtain food, shelter, money, and jobs for the down and out) is EVIL. Because he (or his staff) were unaware that the Red Cross only takes cash.

How evil of him. Especially since the Red Cross is the ONLY charitable organization in the world and he won't possibly be ever able to find somebody else to accept those goods.

Because everybody knows, the poor can only eat money, they can only sleep in cloth made of US tender, and whose roofs must only be made of a pulp died in green ink featuring American Presidents.

[Medz]

And Paul Ryan just wanted to serve soup!

[mn3]

What's in a name? Consider:

Orwellian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson" — a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments. Often, this includes the circumstances depicted in his novels, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[mn3]

Nate Silver7 polls released in Ohio in past 48 hours: Obama +2, Obama +3, Obama +3, Obama +3, Obama +5, Obama +5, Obama +5. #notthatcomplicated 17 minutes ago

[Orwellian O.]

Originally Posted by medz

and paul ryan just wanted to serve soup!

lol!...

[Jeff Hause]

Originally Posted by Orwellian O.

How awful of Mittens. A man who has served as a bishop in his church (or cult to most Christians...or crazy nonsense club to non-mormons and believers of nothing).

A man who has personally presided over his congregation's charitable mission (i.e. he was the guy who helped people obtain food, shelter, money, and jobs for the down and out) is EVIL. Because he (or his staff) were unaware that the Red Cross only takes cash.

How evil of him. Especially since the Red Cross is the ONLY charitable organization in the world and he won't possibly be ever able to find somebody else to accept those goods.

Because everybody knows, the poor can only eat money, they can only sleep in cloth made of US tender, and whose roofs must only be made of a pulp died in green ink featuring American Presidents.

He isn't evil. He's a dumbfuck. Obviously you identify.

[mn3]

NATE SILVER
Obama 78.4% to win Elect. College in 538 forecast. His leads holding in tipping-point states; time waning for Romney. Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com 36 minutes ago

[mn3]

Dick "Perfect First Name for Me" Morris is calling a landslide for Romney and a massive GOP takeover of the Senate.

Here Comes the Landslide | RealClearPolitics

[Jeff Hause]

Well, that's how it should go if, "It's the economy, stupid" is in effect. I still can't believe Romney isn't up by 20 points. What a horrible campaign...

[mn3]

The electoral math is incredibly bad for Romney.

According to 538, he's behind in Virginia, and Ohio, Iowa are likely Obama, and Nevada, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are Safe Obama states.

Just taking the safe states off the map means if Obama wins Ohio, he's relected; or if Obama wins Virginia and Iowa, he's reelected.

[esther kim]

Originally Posted by Medz

Don't get too excited. Obama is anything but a liberal. His second term is going to focus on cutting the social safety net in favor of a "grand bargain" to cut the deficit. He's going to expand his civil liberties violations, and the Democrats will continue to lend them bipartisan consensus. Because you know, when Bush wiretaps without warrants they freak out, but when Obama puts together his kill lists, they get all warm and fuzzy inside.

Did you notice how the theme of each debate was how much Obama and Romney agree with one another? That's not a coincidence.

I wish we shifted the level of conversation to this type of criticism in our media and newspapers. It's always been written that true progressives/liberal would have an easier fight with a Democrat Party. Well, 4yrs ins and what's changed? If anything, I am appalled at the drones strikes that are getting under reported! Rahm Emanuel was quoted as calling Obama a "war president". I have yet to see an end to U.S. wars, close Guantánamo, or the useless homeland security dept with their bullshit wiretapping. Democrats are not on our side nor are they interested in strong unions, real solutions to stop global warming, increased taxes on the rich, etc. They like the Republicans want to keep playing by the rules determined by capitalist crisis: austerity, poverty, war, repression.

I expect Obama to win the election since he has always sustained his lead in the electoral college. But this is the time for true progressives to stop tailoring or hooking our movements/struggles to the Democrat wagon. Rather it's time that we demand they live up to their promises.

[esther kim]

Originally Posted by hack

If Hillary won't then Bill must.

I support this.

[Orwellian O.]

Bob Menedez, NJ Senator (D), has been found to have had sex with Dominican prostitute(s) [maybe, but probably not underage] on taxpayer funded trips.

Has not been officially confirmed, but the net has gone crazy with the story...and the Senator's opponent, Joe Kyrillos, has suddenly put up a "family photo" on his Facebook page.


I'd think Menedez could still pull it off (he is up 20% points), but if this story goes big (we'll probably know tomorrow), this is not going to be good for Team Blue momentum given all the attention already in the NE...this would be a very easy story for journalists to pivot to.

BOB MENENDEZ AND HOOKERS? : The Other McCain



Update:

NOW OFFICIAL

http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/01/wo...nican-republic

[Orwellian O.]

What Bob Menedez thinks about what should happen in such situations involving prostitution (3o seconds or so after the 1:59 mark):

[Orwellian O.]

Another story some may have missed:


Obama now admits to knowing of the terror attacks in Libya in real time. He evidently "issued an order" to do stuff.


(for whatever reason, everything I now post has a hyperlink...don't what that is about...)

[hack]

Originally Posted by esther kim

I wish we shifted the level of conversation to this type of criticism in our media and newspapers. It's always been written that true progressives/liberal would have an easier fight with a Democrat Party. Well, 4yrs ins and what's changed? If anything, I am appalled at the drones strikes that are getting under reported! Rahm Emanuel was quoted as calling Obama a "war president". I have yet to see an end to U.S. wars, close Guantánamo, or the useless homeland security dept with their bullshit wiretapping. Democrats are not on our side nor are they interested in strong unions, real solutions to stop global warming, increased taxes on the rich, etc. They like the Republicans want to keep playing by the rules determined by capitalist crisis: austerity, poverty, war, repression.

I expect Obama to win the election since he has always sustained his lead in the electoral college. But this is the time for true progressives to stop tailoring or hooking our movements/struggles to the Democrat wagon. Rather it's time that we demand they live up to their promises.

Agreed. Defining what's left and what's right and what's extreme and what's moderate in our political spectrum is something the GOP has succeeded in doing. They have wisely set the tone for that debate by calling every extreme thing they do ``a common sense bipartisan solution'', and labelling everything Democrat-originated as ``socialist'' even though so much of what's ongoing is to the right of Reagan. The entire spectrum has moved to the right and newspapers are indeed playing along. The lesson is that you do best by defining the debate. Be proactive and not reactive.

(On my own level, some Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on our door the other day and my kid observed their presence, so Lady Hack and I went out and found some kid lit that explains evolution.)

[mn3]

November 1, 2012, 10:16 am148 Comments
Oct. 31: Obama’s Electoral College ‘Firewall’ Holding in Polls

By NATE SILVER

On Oct. 11, this blog posed the question of whether President Obama’s “firewall” in battleground states was all that it was cracked up to be.


At that point, Mr. Obama still technically held the lead in the FiveThirtyEight forecast in enough states to give him 270 electoral votes. But Colorado, Florida and Virginia had turned red in our map, meaning that our forecast suggested that Mitt Romney had better-than-even odds of winning them. Iowa was just on the verge of doing so. And Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just a percentage point or so in Ohio, which would have collapsed his firewall at its foundation.

Theories that the decline in Mr. Obama’s polls that followed the first presidential debate in Denver would somehow skip the swing states were not looking good — as dubious as the idea that tornadoes “skip” houses.

Instead, at that point, Mr. Obama’s position in the FiveThirtyEight forecast had declined for seven consecutive days. If he stopped the bleeding there, he might still be the Electoral College favorite, albeit a narrow one. But it wasn’t clear where the bottom was.

It turned out, however, that the worst was almost over for him. Mr. Obama had one more terrible day in the polls, on Friday, Oct. 12, when Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College rose to almost 40 percent in the forecast. But that was when Mr. Romney’s momentum stopped.

Since then, Mr. Obama’s standing has rebounded slightly. His position in the national polls has stabilized; although the national polls continue to tell a different story about the race than the state polls do; it can no longer be said that they have Mr. Obama behind. (More about that in a moment.)

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.


There were 12 polls published on Wednesday among Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. Mr. Obama held the lead in 11 of the 12 surveys; the exception was a survey by the University of Iowa, which had Mr. Obama down by about one point there, but also had a very small sample size (about 300 likely voters). On average, Mr. Obama led in the polls of these states by 3.9 percentage points.

None of this ought to have been surprising, exactly, if you have been attentive to the polls rather than the pundits. It was a pretty good day of surveys for Mr. Obama but not a great one: for the most part, the polls were coming in close to FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, give or take a modest outlier here and there.

Rather, the polls in these states confirmed what we already knew: that Mr. Obama remains the favorite in the Electoral College.

Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.

But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.

Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast.

Regular readers will have seen the chart below once or twice before. It sorts the competitive states in order of Mr. Obama’s current projected margin of victory or defeat in each one, keeping a running tally of the number of electoral votes that Mr. Obama is accumulating.


Ohio remains the tipping-point state in the forecast, the one that puts him over the top to 270 electoral votes. There, Mr. Obama leads by 2.6 percentage points, which should convert to a victory about 80 percent of the time given the historical accuracy of polls at this late stage of the race.

Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College without Ohio — a prospect we had defended as being plausible before — are looking more tenuous based on the most recent polling.

If Mr. Obama wins Ohio, and all the states above it on the chart, he’d have 281 electoral votes, meaning that he has 11 to spare. That means he could shed New Hampshire from his list, along with either Iowa or Nevada (although not both).

Of these two states, Nevada appears to be the slightly safer one for Mr. Obama; there, Mr. Obama leads by 3.5 percentage points in the forecast, as opposed to 2.9 percentage points in Iowa. The polling has also been somewhat more consistent in Nevada than in Iowa, another factor that the forecast considers in evaluating the probability of an upset.
One fortunate aspect of these two particular states, from Mr. Obama’s view, is that they are not very similar to one another demographically.

Iowa is quite rural. Nevada occupies a huge geographical territory, but its population is very urban, mostly living in Las Vegas and its suburbs.

Iowa is overwhelmingly white, and has a lot of moderate and middle-income, but highly educated, voters. Nevada certainly has an independent streak, but winning there usually depends more upon building a 50 percent coalition among diverse groups and then turning it out to vote. Iowa has a pretty good economy, all things considered; Nevada’s is still terrible.

Since Mr. Obama only needs to carry one of these states, it helps him that they form a diverse portfolio. If Mr. Obama’s turnout operation is strong, then Nevada should be one of the states where he benefits the most. If, instead, Mr. Obama has little “ground game” advantage, but he holds his own among independent and undecided voters, perhaps persuading them that the economy has improved enough to merit his re-election, Iowa may fall for him.

Mr. Romney could also circumvent his need to win Ohio by carrying Wisconsin, but that is looking tough for him. In Ohio, Mr. Romney is behind by two or three percentage points, on average, in the polls. In Wisconsin, Mr. Romney’s better polls have him down by two or three points, while his worst ones have him six to eight points instead. There’s still enough upside to winning Wisconsin that Mr. Romney should not give up on it, in my view, but his chances are down to 12 percent in the forecast, and most of those cases involve outcomes where he has already won Ohio anyway.

The more debatable cases are Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. Mr. Romney is the clear underdog in each one. But his campaign has so much money that it probably doesn’t hurt Mr. Romney much to spend a little bit of it there to maximize whatever residual chances he might have in case the polls are wrong. (Arguably, it was a poor strategic decision for Mr. Romney to make a half-hearted effort to compete in these states.)

Still, for Mr. Romney to win Michigan, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, the polls would have to be much further off than they are in Ohio.

It doesn’t help Mr. Romney, either, that all of these states are in the same part of the country as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, meaning that they are unlikely to leapfrog them and become the tipping-point state on Tuesday. If, hypothetically, Mr. Romney’s polling were a bit better in culturally and geographically disparate states, like Oregon, New Jersey or New Mexico, they might represent better targets.

If Mr. Obama were to lose Ohio (but hold the other states), the tipping-point would then become Colorado. There, Mr. Obama holds a much more tenuous lead, about one percentage point in our forecast, which converts to about a 60 percent chance of winning. But at least it’s a lead rather than a deficit, whereas Mr. Romney’s non-Ohio paths would require him to win states where he is now three or four percentage points behind.

[mn3]

(cont).

Mr. Obama also remains about a 60 percent favorite in Virginia. Another option would be Florida, although it is a resource-intensive state and we give him about a 40 percent chance of winning there.

While state polls dominated the news on Wednesday, there were also a handful of national polls out, even as others have been suspended in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.


On average, Mr. Obama led by just over one percentage point in these national polls, although it is an odd distribution, with two polls showing him up by four or five points, several showing a tied race, and one (the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll) putting him two points down.


The FiveThirtyEight model calculates a national poll average, using a more sophisticated method than the simple average I’ve taken in the chart. (The model doesn’t “forget” about the Gallup poll, for example, just because it has been suspended for a couple of days.)
We don’t usually print this number, because it would sow confusion: our estimate of the national popular vote, which we do publish, instead represents a combination of national polls and the implied standing of the candidates based on state polls.


But, for what it’s worth, our national poll average shows Mr. Obama up by about half a percentage point right now. This is within the range of other Web sites: Real Clear Politics has an exactly tied race in its national poll average; HuffPost Pollster has Mr. Obama down by three-tenths of a point; Talking Points Memo has Mr. Obama ahead by about one percentage point.


Again: we don’t take the average of the national polls to be tantamount to a forecast of the national popular vote, since state polls, if considered carefully, can provide considerable information about the national race as well.


Suppose, however, that Mr. Obama were to tie Mr. Romney in the popular vote on Tuesday. The way that the forecast model works, this would require subtracting some from Mr. Obama in each state in order for the arithmetic to add up.


Even under these conditions, Mr. Obama would still be a favorite in the forecast. In fact, he’d be about a 70 percent favorite to win the Electoral College conditional upon the national popular vote being tied, according to our simulations.


A tie in the national popular vote is a tolerable condition for Mr. Obama, in other words. His position is robust enough in states like Ohio that he has some slack. With a lead of about 2.5 percentage points in the tipping-point states, Mr. Obama could underperform his state polls by a point or two and still win.


Conversely, Mr. Romney has few chances to win unless the state polls are systematically wrong.


I don’t mean for this to sound dismissive; the polling error could quite easily be correlated across the different states, and the national polls are one reason to be suspicious of the state polls.


But we’re at the point now where Mr. Obama may be a modest favorite even if the national polls are right. Two weeks ago, when Mr. Obama appeared to trail Mr. Romney by a point or so in the national polls, that would not have been the case.

Is it possible that Mr. Obama has benefited, politically, from his handling of Hurricane Sandy? He has gotten high marks for it so far, according to the tracking poll run by The Washington Post and ABC News.


Our database contains roughly a dozen polls that conducted the bulk of their interviews on Tuesday or Wednesday, after Hurricane Sandy became the dominant news story. Most of these are state polls, and most were conducted in states that were isolated from the major effects of the storm.


Our analysis of the trend lines in the polls suggest that they have been a somewhat above-average group for Mr. Obama, perhaps suggesting a percentage point or so of improvement for him.



The model is not yet pricing in very much of this into its forecast, as trends like that can occur fairly easily because of statistical noise. But if the storm has a discernible effect in the polls, it seems more likely to help Mr. Obama than to hurt him based on what we’ve seen so far.



This is something to monitor as more national polls come back online. I think describing the race as a “toss-up” reflects an uninformed interpretation of the evidence, but there is surely room to debate how much of a favorite Mr. Obama is. However, Mr. Romney is not in a position to tolerate any movement in Mr. Obama’s favor given how close we are to the finish line.

[mn3]

Here's an abridged version edited down to the amount that whoDean will read:

Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com

Oct. 30: What State Polls Suggest About the National Popular Vote

By NATE SILVER

... Romney ... could still win.

[hack]

LOL. Still waiting for whoDean to explain how Silver's failure to be the absolute best prognosticator in one election means he's actually biased.

[Big Jerm]

Originally Posted by mn3

Here's an abridged version edited down to the amount that whoDean will read:

LOL....as much as I'm ready for this election to be over, this kind of post will make me miss campaign season just a little bit.

[Medz]

Never mind the fact that Silver told Charlie Rose he's more of a Libertarian:

The controversial New York Times pollster Nate Silver, who has been roundly criticized for his overly-optimistic Barack Obama polling, told Charlie Rose, on his PBS show on Tuesday: "I don't intend to vote this year."

Silver, responding to a Rose question that he had a political bias in favor of the President, added: "I'd say I am somewhere in-between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose."

[whoDean]

Originally Posted by Big Jerm

LOL....as much as I'm ready for this election to be over, this kind of post will make me miss campaign season just a little bit.

Poor Newman will have to return to his own pathetic life instead of trying to be a mini Nate Silver once the election is over.

It still looks like Obama will likely pull off reelection.

[Big Jerm]

Originally Posted by whoDean

Poor Newman will have to return to his own pathetic life instead of trying to be a mini Nate Silver once the election is over.

It still looks like Obama will likely pull off reelection.

Actually, whoDean, I was laughing because Newman called you out on your lack of evidence to dispute Silver's credentials, and your repeated failure to read the material that explains his methods. However pathetic his life may or may not be following this election, he's pretty much beat you to death on this topic.

[whoDean]

If you want to believe Silver is unbiased, go right ahead.

You will notice he hasn't released an explanation of his exact weighting methodology.

But big picture yes, Obama is favored to be reelected, just as we've all agreed here for months.

[hack]

NewDean won this battle against whoMan, but I suspect the war is far from over.

[Big Jerm]

My opinion on Silver is pretty irrelevant. I'm not into analyzing polls, so all I can go by is reputation. Based on that, Silver is #1, and the only people who tend to claim he's liberal-biased are those on the far right(with their own obvious bias). But yes, I believe Obama will likely be re-elected, and that's really the issue at hand, rather than poll numbers.

[Stefan S]

Originally Posted by whoDean

If you want to believe Silver is unbiased, go right ahead.

You will notice he hasn't released an explanation of his exact weighting methodology.

But big picture yes, Obama is favored to be reelected, just as we've all agreed here for months.

Actually, he has, for example here: FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Pollster Ratings v4.0: Methodology

[ThaMaestro]

The presidential race must be locked up at this point if all we have to argue about is those who predict the winners of presidential races.

[Medz]

Originally Posted by whoDean

If you want to believe Silver is unbiased, go right ahead.

You will notice he hasn't released an explanation of his exact weighting methodology.

But big picture yes, Obama is favored to be reelected, just as we've all agreed here for months.

The point is not whether or not you think he's biased. It's a matter of how you think his bias impacts his polling methodology, what purpose this serves, and who you think will offer a more accurate measurement. Sounds pretty simple to me. We all agree Obama is going to win - if Nate Silver is as biased as you claim he is, then his final prediction should be significantly higher than Obama's actual total. The problem is, all the guys you mentioned as being better than Silver are pretty much predicting the same outcome.

So how exactly do you think Silver's bias will play out? Which "unbiased" analysts will be more accurate? Do you think Sabato and Cook are going to predict a closer margin of victory, and for that reason, be more accurate once the election is over? Are they going to get more Senate and House elections correct? That's the great thing - we can easily measure this in a few days.

[mn3]

Personally, I'm nerdy enough (as are many people who live pathetic lives) to enjoy the poll reading. Of course, who gets elected and the policies he stands for and get enacted, and who they appoint to the Supreme Court are much more important then how experts call the race. But I like the thought that goes into the work people like Silver do.I'm much less interested in pollsters who work for the candidates and whose job it is to create propoganda and spin.

[Orwellian O.]

As far as polling it is all about turnout. If democrats turn out in similar numbers as they did in 2008, Obama wins. If not, he loses.


Mittens is expanding his campaign to new states while Obama is trying to hold off collapse in a few key states.

Mittens probably is having a better go of it than team Obama.


The only thing positive Obama has going is a hurricane which had helped quell some of the uproar over his cover up of a massive security failure.

[mn3]

In case you missed it the first time:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Orwellian" is an adjective describing the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson" — a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments.

Guys (and gals, Welcome back Esther!), this poster has been goofing on us the whole time.

[hack]

So how exactly do you think Silver's bias will play out? Which "unbiased" analysts will be more accurate? Do you think Sabato and Cook are going to predict a closer margin of victory, and for that reason, be more accurate once the election is over? Are they going to get more Senate and House elections correct? That's the great thing - we can easily measure this in a few days.

He doesn't have thoughts on that. He can't answer the question. He's regurgitating something he read somewhere and probably doesn't fully comprehend.

[mn3]

Michael Bloomberg Endorses Obama For Reelection

adding to the groundswell which seems to be on Obama's side now. If the election is as close as the Republicans want you to believe, this helps Obama around the margins.