Romney, Obama, Rasmussen

Time to face the facts. Romney has maintained consistent + territory on RCP since the first debate. Not huge. Right now he is +09.
 
RandFan said:
Time to face the facts. Romney has maintained consistent + territory on RCP since the first debate. Not huge. Right now he is +09.
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Well, one of the Dem pundits was quoted a couple of days ago saying that the problem with the popular vote polls is that the given model for accuracy is now off. The LV label is more highly prized in polls, but LV is based on someone who's voted in three of four last elections or four of five. If they get someone who was eligible but only voted in one election of three, say, they don't include them in the call list. They need a way to track "motivated this time to be a LV".

Now, both sides would claim that they have that segment locked up, of course. The GOP has a "fired up base" who just want to win the White House back so badly that they'd vote for a ticket of Spiro Agnew and Herbert Hoover right now. And the Dems have a much more engaged Latino vote and a very difficult to track student demographic. Personally, I'd give the edge in "Should Be Counted as Likely Voter" to the team with the ground game. Obama's got pros out there, his own pros with five years of grassroots organizing under their belts. Romney has no such organization. He's handed the ground game over to the RNC, who run a much smaller and looser operation. The years of the GOP having better and more accurate data on focus groups are over. The Obama organization changed all that.
 
I think this is the main thread about polling for the presidential race, so I think this is the best place to share this perspective from the UK Telegraph:

Nate Silver, the geeky statistician who is singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum

Nate Silver is Mitt Romney’s nemesis. Not intentionally; although he admits to being an Obama supporter, his whole career is predicated on getting his predictions right. Like he did in 2008, when "Poblano" accurately predicted the result of 49 of the 50 states, and all 35 senate races.

And it is that reputation for accuracy that is so damaging to the Romney campaign’s attempt to sustain their precious “momentum” narrative. People listen to Silver. And over the past 48 hours, the narrative is starting to shift. “Mitt-mentum? Not so fast” – US News & World report. “Romney’s Momentum Seems To Have Stopped” – Political Wire. “The momentum myth” – Washington Post.

In fact, Silver is proving so damaging to their chances that Republican’s are drawing up a strategy for countering him. “Nate Silver continues to lead the Democrat Graveyard whistling choir”, Republican blogger Robert Stacy McCain wrote on Tuesday. National Review decried “Nate Silver’s Flawed Model”. “Everyone but Nate Silver thinks Obama’s lead is evaporating fast”, said Business Insider.

But the truth is we don’t. And the Romney camp knows it.
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Olowkow said:

Uhm..... +0.9 :)
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And it's the same every day at RCP for the past three days. 0.9 + or - is so well within the MOE that it's really a toss-up for the popular vote.

And that's not the battle - that just gets headlines. The battle is for the EC and the EC doesn't look good for Romney, especially with them being the team that is shifting targets and grasping at straws. Moderate Presidential Mitt got Rightwing Nutbar Mitt up to nearly even in the popular vote, but I suspect that a bunch of undecided voters in Dallas or Atlanta who now definitely want Romney is not going to get him the blue collar guy in Ohio... Unless the blue collar guy in Ohio simply says, "Hey, I wanna vote for the guy who's ahead", and while there may be some of those, there aren't that many, and he's not picking up the votes he needs there.
 
AdMan said:
I think this is the main thread about polling for the presidential race, so I think this is the best place to share this perspective from the UK Telegraph:

Nate Silver, the geeky statistician who is singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum
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Romney's big mo stopped two weeks ago. The thing is that it stayed flat at a relatively good position, so it gave an illusion of him now looking like a winner. Combine that with some negative hits for Obama on the Libya mis-handling and it kept that illusion in place. I've been calling this for two weeks. I think the problem is that the GOP believes their own b.s. and figured that once things started in their direction the huge groundswell of right-thinking individuals would push Romney into the stratosphere. Well, they've played all their cards and they're sitting there with a full house, three tens showing and a pair of fives in the hole. The other guy only shows two jacks and a six, but they're beginning to suspect, as many of us are, that he's got a jack and a six in the hole. (And if Rasmussen announces that NJ is in play all of a sudden, it'll look like Slim's holding two jacks.)

ETA: And over at Intrade, speaking of gambling, apparently the "floor" has been lowered once again. The bettors are happy with an over-under for Romney at about 3.65. This is down .55 from the floor a few days ago at 4.20 and like a lead balloon compared to the much hyped 4.50 of Wednesday.
 
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AdMan said:
I think this is the main thread about polling for the presidential race, so I think this is the best place to share this perspective from the UK Telegraph:

Nate Silver, the geeky statistician who is singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum
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Good article. Between Silver's work and the prediction markets, it was obvious that Romney's "momentum" fizzled a couple of weeks back.

I expect the right-wingers to start attacking Silver in force now, just as they did a month back with their "skewed polls" nonsense. Fine, let them go after Silver and so on... it'll make their defeat on Nov 6th all the more entertaining.

Btw, speaking of markets, at Predictwise Romney is now down to 34.5%. Yup, that's momentum! :rolleyes:
 
RandFan said:
I admit it's slim but it's been consistent in Romney's favor. Predictwise shows that Romney's is falling.
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I think the point Olowkow was making is that the number is +.9 not +9 (without the decimal).... I think you had a typo on your original post is all.

;)
 
Brainster said:
I think where Silver goes off the rails is that his computer runs treat each state as an independent event. Thus if you look, say, at Ohio, where he has Romney at 30% to win, and Pennsylvania, where Romney's at 11%, his run will assess Romney's chances of taking both states at 3.3% (30% times 11%). If these were truly independent events, that would make sense.

The problem is that they are not independent. In the real world, if Romney wins Ohio, the odds that he wins Pennsylvania go up dramatically; not to 100% and maybe not to 50%, but certainly far higher than 11%. This is because whatever happens to make Romney win Ohio almost certainly is helping him in Pennsylvania as well.
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Here you go, Brainster...just for you:

It’s important to keep in mind that the potential errors in the polls between different states are partly correlated with one another. That is, if Mr. Romney overperforms his polls on Election Day in a state like Ohio, he is also somewhat more likely to do so in other states like Iowa, especially if they are demographically similar.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast accounts for this property in its overall assessment of the Electoral College, and it is one reason why our forecast gives Mr. Romney slightly better Electoral College chances than other forecast models that might assume more independence in the state polling. However, we may be approaching the point where the state polls will have to be systematically biased toward Mr. Obama in order for Mr. Romney to have strong chances of prevailing on Election Day.
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http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/oct-25-the-state-of-the-states/
 
I liked Nate Silver's article talking about state polling averages.

fivethirtyeight-1027-satstate3-tmagSF.png


Romney's chances in Ohio aren't looking great, according to this. Even more interesting...

It is important to emphasize that this analysis covers cases in which there were at least three distinct polling firms active in a state; you will find more frequent misses in cases where there were just one or two polls.

In Ohio, however, there are not just three polls: roughly a dozen polling firms, rather, have surveyed the state over the past 10 days.
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I'm guessing they are seeing the writing on the wall, and that's why they are concentrating their efforts on other states.
 
Okay, here's a question for all the Nate Silver fans here. Ever since the first debate, Mitt Romney has held a pretty clear advantage in the RCP national poll index. He's currently at 47.7% versus Obama's 46.8, an advantage of 0.9 percentage points. In five out of the last six polls, Romney has been in the lead; the one poll in that half-dozen that Obama was leading had him up by only 1 percentage point.

Okay, so I can understand why Silver still rates Obama as more likely to win the election; this is not a popular-vote contest, but a 50-state electoral college race. But how is it possible that Silver rates Obama as 71.4% likely to win the popular vote?
 
Brainster said:
Okay, here's a question for all the Nate Silver fans here. Ever since the first debate, Mitt Romney has held a pretty clear advantage in the RCP national poll index. He's currently at 47.7% versus Obama's 46.8, an advantage of 0.9 percentage points. In five out of the last six polls, Romney has been in the lead; the one poll in that half-dozen that Obama was leading had him up by only 1 percentage point.

Okay, so I can understand why Silver still rates Obama as more likely to win the election; this is not a popular-vote contest, but a 50-state electoral college race. But how is it possible that Silver rates Obama as 71.4% likely to win the popular vote?
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Silver weights polls according to various factors, including whether they tend to have a Democratic or Republican lean. He also uses data from state polls in estimating the popular vote.

Here's an article that might be helpful.

You can question his methods if you like, but he's not just making it up.
 
Brainster said:
But how is it possible that Silver rates Obama as 71.4% likely to win the popular vote?
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Is this a trick question?

As of this writing, Silver predicts Obama winning 50.4% of the popular vote and 74.6% chance of winning the Electoral College on November 6.
 
Brainster said:
Okay, so I can understand why Silver still rates Obama as more likely to win the election; this is not a popular-vote contest, but a 50-state electoral college race. But how is it possible that Silver rates Obama as 71.4% likely to win the popular vote?
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Methodology trumps desire. His model weights the state polls more heavily than the national polls (correctly, according to history), and he also notes the (D) or (R) lean of each of the polls -- as well as the trends in each poll, and the scattershot tendencies (Gallup, for example, tends to have very wide swings, so anything near the edges of its trend -- be it +Romney or +Obama -- has to be taken with a grain of salt).

It's also worth noting two extra factors here: 49.1% to 49.0% counts as a popular vote "win", and the RCP spread (which has been very rarely above 1%) is well within any poll's margin of error.
 
Upchurch said:
Is this a trick question?

As of this writing, Silver predicts Obama winning 50.4% of the popular vote and 74.6% chance of winning the Electoral College on November 6.
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Yes, it's a trick question. Does anyone here actually believe that Brainster doesn't CLEARLY understand the EC process? Show of hands. Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

It's the same reason that Fox leads with the RCP average only if it's in Romney's favor for the past ten days. When/if he falls behind, they'll lead with Gallup or Rasmussen. They're playing up the popular vote now over at RNC HQ Fox, because they're planning on becoming the group they most abhor... the 2000 Whiny Democrats who wouldn't shut up about winning the popular vote yet losing the election. Wasn't the GOP rejoinder back then your basic "STFU, everyone knows the Ellectoral College elects the President. Didn't you libs read your Constitution? Sour Grapes because you lost!"

I expect to see much of this posturing on election night. The Fox talking heads, be it O'Reilly, van Susteren, Kelly, Hannity or Huckabee... are not ignorant. (Well,... okay, "Hannity" is a bit of a stretch...) But they're going to be staring sincerely into those cameras absolutely aghast that "The American People have spoken, and they chose goodness and light, but the evil Founding Fathers have taken your right to be heard away from you!"
 
Perhaps he does't understand the EC, though, Foolmewunz - Many otherwise intelligent people have no concept of how it re-weights the electorate.

Romney could rise to 60% of the popular vote and still lose if all those gains are in states he was already going to win, Brainster.
 
remirol said:
Methodology trumps desire. His model weights the state polls more heavily than the national polls (correctly, according to history), and he also notes the (D) or (R) lean of each of the polls -- as well as the trends in each poll, and the scattershot tendencies (Gallup, for example, tends to have very wide swings, so anything near the edges of its trend -- be it +Romney or +Obama -- has to be taken with a grain of salt).

It's also worth noting two extra factors here: 49.1% to 49.0% counts as a popular vote "win", and the RCP spread (which has been very rarely above 1%) is well within any poll's margin of error.
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And from today's 538, Nate answers this question himself:

538 said:
Of the remaining gains that Mr. Romney has made in national polls, much of it may have come from his improved performance in deeply red states; that is where our state-by-state forecasts show his numbers improving the most. It might be kept in mind that, during the Republican primaries, Mr. Romney’s performance was strongest in states and counties that are Democratic-leaning in general elections, while being weaker in deeply red areas. As highly conservative voters became more comfortable with Mr. Romney, however, he made gains among them.
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Basically, Romney has opened up huge leads in states that were always super-conservative, and not having any impact on the moderates.
 
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