Is the Presidential Race Tightening Heading Into the Debates? (Nate Silver)

[flamingdem]

NOTE: twitterer ‏@LOLGOP sez:

What Nate Silver didn't say: The polls aren't tightening yet but whatever Mitt Romney has between his butt cheeks is almost done.



There are two basic types of information that we’re looking to discern out of each poll. One is simply the raw number: how much does the poll have President Obama leading or trailing Mitt Romney by? The other is the trendline: does the poll show toward a shift toward either candidate from previous editions of the same survey?

In the long run, you’d hope that the answers to these questions are compatible with one another. If a set of polls show good numbers for Mr. Obama, you’d expect them to be good in both an absolute sense and also relative to earlier points in the race.

But sometimes there are days when looking at the polls through these different frames produces a somewhat different take on them. Monday was one such occasion.

There were nine national polls published on Monday, which are listed in the table below. On average, they showed Mr. Obama with a 3.5 percentage point lead over Mr. Romney.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/oct-1-is-the-presidential-race-tightening-heading-into-the-debates/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[liberal N proud]

1. Since the election is a state by state thing, here are the important polls.

If you are going to look at polls at all.



Forgot to link this: It can be found in the original article liste above.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/state-and-national-polls-tell-different-tales-about-state-of-campaign/

[flamingdem]

3. Looking sprightly

Thanks for that overview of inevitability

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. The period bet. now and the election is going to be statistics overload...

And stats can be massaged, analyzed - even spun - every which way. I just read the article you posted - and although I like Nate's columns, he is spraining and breaking all sorts of ligaments and bones to come up with the dreaded tied electoral college scenario.

I am going to try my hardest to not overreact to daily polls, watch the big stories/themes, and hope like hell that the Obama team plays things as smart as they are capable of....there isn't too much that can be done with the right wing voting idiots...but we must get out the registered Obama voters and ensure those who aren't registered, are - and vote!

[cemaphonic]

4. That tied EV post was basically just a thought exercise though.

He's got the chances of that happening at 0.6% - I think he's just getting bored of finding new ways to say that Romney's hopes are slipping farther away each day.