Swing State Maps & Five Thirty Eight Forecast for 10/6/12

[courseofhistory]

These are all compiled from poll averages many of which use RCP. You can see that Obama would have to lose FL, OH, NC and one other state to lose the elction. I just don't see that heppening, especially looking at Nate Silver's 538 Forecast. But of course, anything is possible. Also, look at the tossup states and comment on which of those you think might be in play for Obama or Romney if you like.

[center]Huffington Post Election Dashboard

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POLITICO

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FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

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REAL CLEAR POLITICS

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[elleng]

1. Not concerned. See below another statistician's analysis:

Obama 348, Romney 190: UAH astrophysicist, who got it right twice before, predicts electoral results.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021465235

Check his methodology. (Not difficult.)

[Proud Public Servant]

3. He may literally be a rocket scientist

But his numbers are off by 1; his own projection actually adds up to 347-191.

[courseofhistory]

4. Is this static or

does he update it like Nate Silver?

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. A link and a snip of the text of the analysis from Nate on what the numbers may mean.

There is another type of polling bias, however, which is potentially more relevant when there is polling after a major development in the news cycle. Namely, polls are very probably biased toward high-information voters who take more interest in the news and are more likely to respond to political surveys. This issue may be more profound in automated polls, which have especially low response rates — often only 3 or 4 percent of the people they call respond to them.

So it’s hard to distinguish a genuine shift toward Mr. Romney, from a real but potentially temporary shift based on changes in voter enthusiasm, from an artificial change caused by a bias toward heavy news consumers.

But now there’s another complication: the government reported a strong jobs report on Friday, which changed the tone of the news cycle. To the extent that the polls reflected people’s reaction to the news coverage of the debate as much as the debate itself, the jobs report could blunt some of Mr. Romney’s momentum if the tenor of news coverage changes.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast did show a clear shift toward Mr. Romney on Friday, giving him a 15.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College — up from 12.9 percent on Thursday.

My subjective view is that, despite the somewhat mixed messages that the polls gave about the magnitude of Mr. Romney’s bounce, this is still too conservative. The forecast model is pretty “smart” about distinguishing random movements in the polls from real ones, and so can be fairly conservative in interpreting the data. However, it does not have the advantage of knowing that the shifts may have come for a good reason — in this case, Mr. Romney’s strong performance in the debate.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/oct-5-day-after-debate-strong-swing-state-polls-for-romney/

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

[Retrograde]

5. There's gotta be a better way to chose a president

I'm in one of those dark blue places by the coast so as far as we're concerned the biggest (or at least the most widely contested) campaign this fall is for school board. How much campaigning/exposure does it take to get these people in the swing states to make up their minds?