The FiveThirtyEight forecast was essentially unchanged on Monday, with Barack Obama holding a 77.7 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Mr. Obama received a number of strong-looking state polls on Monday, including some from firms that had him with mixed numbers before. Probably the most noteworthy of these was a Wisconsin poll from the firm We Ask America, which put Mr. Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by 11.5 percentage points there.
Recent polls have shown everything from a near-tie in Wisconsin to a 14-point lead for Mr. Obama. But on the whole, the data suggests that Mr. Obama has gained more ground in Wisconsin than in other states since the conventions — perhaps because they may have nullified a bounce that Mr. Romney had received in polls of Wisconsin in August following the selection of Representative Paul D. Ryan as his running mate.
Still, if the set of state polling was strong for Mr. Obama on Monday, the same has been true on most days over the past week or two. Further, in some of the swing states, there have been as many as a dozen poll releases since the convention, meaning that any one new poll usually won’t shift the FiveThirtyEight forecast all that much, especially if the firm conducting the survey is rated as being of middling quality.
That’s not to say that further state polling data will never move the numbers — but reasonably strong state polling for Mr. Obama is already “priced in” to the model at this point.
State polls can be used to make inferences about where the national race stands, and our program reads the collective sum of the state-level data as implying that Mr. Obama has just slightly more than a 5-point lead in the national race right now. Read more…
We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Here is a look at Washington, the Evergreen State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Mark A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Washington.
In presidential elections from the early 1880s through the mid-20th century, Washington was a swing state, even slightly Republican-leaning. In 1980, Ronald Reagan over-performed in Washington relative to his margin of victory in the nation as a whole.
After that election, however, the state’s partisan makeup began to shift. Washington voters began to move — and fairly quickly — toward the Democratic Party.
Reagan carried the state again in 1984, but he underperformed his national popular vote by four percentage points. By the 1988 election, Washington had been transformed. It was nine percentage points more Democratic-leaning than the nation, and George H. W. Bush failed to carry it. Washington has been reliably blue ever since.
“Democrats had about a 10 point shift in their direction in about a decade,” Mr. Smith said. Read more…
With fewer than 45 days left in the presidential campaign, it’s no longer a cliché to say that every week counts. And there are a few polling-related themes we’ll be watching especially closely this week.
This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce. That is not to say that Mr. Obama’s standing could not decline later on in the race, for any number of reasons. But if they do, it will probably need to be forced by Mr. Romney’s campaign, or by developments in the news cycle, not the mere loss of post-convention momentum.
We’ll also be looking to see if there is a greater consensus in the polls this week. In general, last week’s numbers started out a bit underwhelming for Mr. Obama — suggesting that the momentum from his convention was eroding — but then picked up strength as the week wore on.
Still, there were splits among the tracking polls and among other national surveys; between state polls that called cellphones and those which did not; and among pollsters who came to a wide variety of conclusions about whose supporters were more enthusiastic and more likely to turn out.
But before we get lost in the weeds, let’s consider a more basic question. What did the polling look like at this stage in past elections, and how did it compare against the actual results?
Read more…
It’s something of a tradition for newspapers to release polls on Sundays late in a presidential campaign. This Sunday, there were polls out in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — but as it’s Nebraska day at FiveThirtyEight, let’s start with one from the Cornhusker State.
The Nebraska poll, from Wiese Research Associates for the Omaha World-Herald, put Mr. Romney 14 points ahead among likely voters statewide. Nebraska, however, awards three of its five electoral votes by Congressional district; Mr. Obama narrowly won the vote of the Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which is largely coterminous with the city of Omaha, in 2008. The Wiese Research Associates poll showed a tied race in the Second District, suggesting that such an outcome is possible again this year.
The FiveThirtyEight forecast, which accounts for district-level polls in Nebraska and in Maine (the other state which splits its electoral votes in this way), is more skeptical about this possibility. It gives Mr. Obama a 20 percent chance of winning the district (although that’s up from about a 10 percent chance before the poll came out).
Part of this is for a technical reason: the district-level results that the poll published were among registered voters, rather than likely voters, and a tie for Mr. Obama among registered voters would normally translate into a narrow deficit for him among likely ones.
The nonpolling factors that the model uses, like fund-raising data, also suggest that Mr. Obama will have a difficult time repeating his performance in Omaha. This year, Mr. Obama has raised just $261,000 in Omaha zip codes, as compared to $638,000 for Mr. Romney. (This contrasts with 2008, when Mr. Obama slightly outraised John McCain in Omaha.) Also, as Micah Cohen explained, the district’s boundaries were redrawn in a way that makes them ever-so-slightly more favorable to Republicans. And Mr. Obama had overperformed there in 2008, even relative to his strong performance nationally, partly because of the element of surprise. Read more…
We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Here is a look at Nebraska, the Cornhusker State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with John R. Hibbing, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Paul Landow, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The most impressive victory of President Obama’s 2008 campaign may have also been the most minute: he won a single electoral vote by a single percentage point in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District. (Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that awards electoral votes by Congressional district.)
Nebraska’s Second District was the reddest electoral vote Mr. Obama carried in 2008. It falls to the right of traditionally Republican states like North Carolina and Virginia on FiveThirtyEight’s Presidential Voting Index and was the farthest Mr. Obama was able to penetrate into G.O.P. territory.
But after the election, Nebraska Republicans responded with a fairly simple strategy. They moved the Second District even farther behind the battlements, redrawing the district lines after the 2010 Census to make it more Republican and “avoid what they considered to be the debacle of losing the seat to Obama in 2008,” Mr. Landow said. Read more…
Saturday brought a light volume of polling data, and the FiveThirtyEight forecast was not much changed. Barack Obama’s chances of winning the Electoral College are 77.5 percent, according to the model, slightly improved from 76.9 percent in Friday’s forecast.
The polls that were published since our Friday update, all of which were national polls, had mixed results. Mr. Obama gained ground on Mitt Romney in the online tracking polls conducted by Ipsos and by the RAND Corporation. Nevertheless, he lost two percentage points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, and his numbers held steady in the Gallup tracking poll, which continues to show a tied race. (We’ll have more about how to think about that Gallup poll in a separate article.)
Mr. Obama’s numbers also held steady, at a four-point lead among likely voters, in a United Press International national poll, which is being published roughly once per week.
Over all, Saturday’s data seemed like a total wash — so why did Mr. Obama’s forecast improve, even incrementally? Read more…
We make an effort to be disciplined about the way that we characterize the polls each day. Generally speaking, if the FiveThirtyEight forecast moves appreciably toward President Obama, the tenor of the article is going to be favorable to him — and likewise for Mitt Romney, if the same is true for him.
If the forecast remains unchanged, we won’t try to emphasize the smallest ticks of movement.
Sometimes, though, a day’s worth of polling falls into the awkward middle ground between being a good day for one of the candidates and revealing little new information about the state of the campaign.
Friday was one such case: a reasonably strong day in the polls for Mr. Obama, but nothing that ought to alter our impressions of the race.
Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the presidential election are listed at 76.9 percent by the forecast model, an incremental improvement from 76.1 percent on Thursday.
The trend over the last three days is clearer: Mr. Obama’s forecast is up from a 72.9 percent chance of winning the Electoral College on Tuesday. However, he remains off his highest point in the forecast early last week, when he topped out at 80.8 percent.
Emblematic of Mr. Obama’s good-but-not-great polling day were a set of polls from the firm Purple Strategies, which had him ahead in four of the five swing states: Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. However, Mr. Obama still trailed Mr. Romney by one point in Florida, according to the poll. Read more…
President Obama’s position inched forward in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Thursday. His chances of winning the Electoral College are 76.1 percent, according to the forecast, up from 75.2 percent on Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s projected margin of victory in the national popular vote also increased slightly, to 3.4 percentage points.
By and large, the story that Thursday’s polls told was the same one as on Wednesday. Mr. Obama continues to get very strong results in state polls that use industry-standard methodology, meaning that they use live interviews and place calls to mobile phones along with landlines.
In the 10 states that have generally been ranked the highest on our tipping-point list — Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan — there have been 21 such polls since the Democratic convention ended. Mr. Obama has led in all 21 of these surveys — and usually by clear margins. On average, he has held a six-point lead in these surveys, and he has had close to 50 percent of the vote in them.
Mr. Obama’s results have been more varied among polling firms that use different methodologies. A series of polls in eleven swing states, released on Thursday by the online firm YouGov, were fairly strong for Mr. Obama, putting him ahead among likely voters in all of the states except North Carolina.
But automated polls, like those from the Rasmussen Reports, have had lukewarm results for Mr. Obama. A Rasmussen Reports poll released on Thursday, for instance, put Mr. Obama three points behind in Iowa.
Read more…
At about 1:30 on Wednesday afternoon, I tweeted in exasperation: “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.”
I’d just seen a Marquette University poll of Wisconsin, which put President Obama 14 points ahead of Mitt Romney there. This came after a Rasmussen Reports poll of New Hampshire, published earlier that day, which had given Mitt Romney a three-point lead in the Granite State.
There is no plausible universe in which Mr. Obama wins Wisconsin by 14 points but loses New Hampshire by three. It’s not even obvious which of the states is more favorable for him. Earlier this week, for instance, we’d seen a Wisconsin poll putting Mr. Obama up just one point there, while a different survey of New Hampshire gave him a five-point lead.
Following the polls on Wednesday reminded me of the aphorism: “If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.” When there are twenty or more polls published in day, as there were on Wednesday, there are necessarily going to be some stronger or weaker ones for either candidate.
There are also going to be some outliers — sometimes because of unavoidable statistical variance, sometimes because the polling company has a partisan bias, sometimes because it just doesn’t know what it’s doing. (And sometimes: because of all of the above.)
Read more…
The trend in the presidential race has been difficult to discern lately. President Obama has very probably gained ground since the conventions, but it’s hard to say exactly how much, and how quickly his bounce is eroding.
There are no such ambiguities in the race for control of the Senate, however. Polls show key races shifting decisively toward the Democrats, with the Republican position deteriorating almost by the day.
Since we published our initial Senate forecast on Tuesday, Republicans have seen an additional decline in their standing in two major races.
Two polls of Virginia published on Wednesday gave the Democrat, the former Gov. Tim Kaine, leads of 4 and 7 percentage points over the Republican, the former Senator George Allen. The FiveThirtyEight forecast model now gives Mr. Kaine roughly a 75 percent chance of winning the seat on the strength of the new polls, up from about 60 percent in Tuesday’s forecast.
Read more…
Loading Twitter messages...
