While the Obama campaign is in meltdown mode, I continue my graphs being totally focused on Romney.
First up, popular vote polling:
RCP: Obama, 47.0%; Romney, 47.9% (minor movement to Romney)
Nate Silver: Obama, 50.2%; Romney, 48.7% (barely moved for Romney)
Unskewed polls: Obama, 45.8%; Romney, 50.0% (went back to 2 days ago result..okay, I see the problem – yesterday's number was their election day projection, and today's number is their poll averaging/unskewed polls. So ignore that blip for now. I'm not going to change that outlier.)
Electoral College projections:
RCP: Obama, 201; Romney, 191; Toss-up, 146 (they moved NC from Romney to Tossup… yeah right)
RCP No Tossup: Obama, 281; Romney, 257 (no change)
Nate Silver: Obama, 294.1; Romney, 243.9 (shift of about 3 electoral votes to Obama)
Unskewed polls: Obama, 179; Romney, 359 (no change, but seriously crack-smoking… for now)
Win probabilities: (will not necessarily add to 1)
Nate Silver: Obama, 73.1%; Romney 26.9% (movement of 3 percentage points to Obama)
InTrade: Obama, 61.9%; Romney, 38.2% (movement of 2 percentage points to Obama)
The forecast is also designed, however, to weight the economic component less and less as time goes on, eventually defaulting to a purely poll-based model by Election Day. (The guiding principle behind this is simply that voters’ views of the economy should be priced into the polling by late in the race.) Although the economic component of the model is dynamic — it can change as new economic statistics are released — it is generally less volatile than the polling component. (While there have been some ups and downs in the economic numbers, nothing has changed the basic story of an economy that is recovering, but slowly.) So as the polling component comes to predominate, the overall forecast will become more volatile as well.….On the other hand, because we are often now getting 20 polls on a given day — instead of two or three — there is potentially more evidence to testify to a statistically meaningful change in the race if it is reflected in the polling consensus.Furthermore, it is now late enough in the race that news events that produce what would ordinarily be a temporary “bounce” in the polls could carry forward to Election Day.
Now, Mr. Silver could be on the up-and-up here, but it's credibility crunch mode for many. It may have been fun to say "Yay, Obama is gonna win!" for months, but if there's a blowout electoral result for Romney, you're going to need to cover your ass.
So explanations as to why you were so wrong for so long will be important to set up ahead of time.
By the way, because all these graphs are linked to my publicly available Google spreadsheet, everytime I update the spreadsheet, the graphs in all the posts will update at the same time.
