This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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One state changes status today and it moves in a surprising direction given the overwhelming talk of the Obama bounce following the Democratic Convention. Virginia moves from just barely Obama, to just barely Romney:
Since the Conventions ended, I’ve added polls in AL, AZ, FL, IL, MA, MN, NC, NJ, NM, OH, VA and WA. Twelve states. Eleven of these states didn’t change categories. Now the first one does, and it is Virginia. Not moving toward Obama, but moving toward Romney. But what about the bounce?? Aren’t all the polls showing a massive movement toward Obama right now? What is going on?
Well, the national polls have been showing that kind of move. The expectation is that the state polls will naturally follow. If the “bounce” lasts awhile and does not immediately fade, then they probably still will. But so far that just isn’t showing up. Now, since I use a five poll average, even if there is a move on one new poll, it might not cause a category shift right away. In most of these cases though, the new polls at the state level have been right in the same general range as the polls from before the conventions. Perhaps there has been some movement, just none that has moved any state to a new category in my model.
Until Virginia. Moving toward Romney. The five poll average moves from an Obama lead of 1.6% to a Romney lead of 0.2%. As usual when states move from “leaning” one way to “leaning” I will point out that any lead under 5% can disappear overnight with the right set of things in the news. I color all the states where the lead is less than 5% the same color on my map. These states really are close. They could go either way. And the states where the margin is less than 2%? Even more so. You might as well flip a coin.
So one should be very careful ascribing too much significance when one state flips back and forth across the line. The “current” model does move in this case… where every state goes the way the five poll average stands today. But I list the two “best case” scenarios here for a reason. To see where we really are, you need to look at that full range of possibilities. (Although of course we’re more likely to get a result “toward the middle” than near the edges of this range where one or the other candidate sweep all the close states… itself an unlikely scenario.)
In any case, the new update to the models:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
219 |
319 |
| Obama Best Case |
180 |
358 |
Bottom line, Obama is still ahead. He has a much stronger position. But Romney does have multiple ways to win. If the conventions have produced a bounce that improves Obama’s position substantially, it isn’t showing up in the electoral college yet.
My prediction from my last update that the beginning of September was going to be Romney’s peak in my model looks like it hasn’t come to pass though. My model shows Romney in a bit better position now than he was at the time of that update. Oh well! (Edit 2012 Sep 13 16:25… actually, my prediction was that the beginning of September would mark Romney’s peak. Although Virginia flipping did improve Romney’s position over the last update, it still isn’t as good as it was at the beginning of September, so my prediction has actually held so far…)
Conventional wisdom is that you have to wait for a couple weeks after the convention for public opinion to “settle down”. Add to that the fact that if you are looking state by state you have to wait for the critical states to get polled and you realize we’ve still got very incomplete information at the state level.
Since the conventions ended, of the close states Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15) and Virginia (13) have been polled. Of these, only Ohio has been polled more than once. No new polls at all yet for Michigan (16), Tennessee (11), Wisconsin (10), Colorado(9), Iowa (6), Nevada (6), or New Hampshire (4).
So… we still need to wait for a bit more polling to see where things really stand in this post convention stage. Polling should be continuing to accelerate as we approach November, so with luck we won’t have to wait too long.
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
Edit 2012 Sep 12 11:13 UTC to correct the list of states with polls added since the convention to include AL and NJ, which I’d forgotten.
One change today. Just barely Romney Florida becomes just barely Obama Florida:
Now, some of you may remember my commentary on August 22nd when Florida moved to Romney. I mentioned that what pushed the average over to Romney was a poll showing a 14% lead for Romney… which was way out of line with any polling in the previous year… many sites that do poll analysis were just dropping it entirely as an outlier. I explained that I just leave everything in, and figure outliers will wash themselves out on their own before too long. That is exactly what happened here. As soon as the outlier poll aged out of the “Last 5 Polls” that I use for my average, Florida popped right back to being (just barely) leaning Obama. If I had simply excluded this poll, Obama’s lead in the five poll average would have dropped to 0.2%, but it would never have gone negative.
In any case, the five poll average now stands at an 0.8% Obama lead in Florida, so the state gets moved back into his column for the moment. I will caution, as I always do, that even leads up to 5% can be extremely ephemeral under the right circumstances. That is why I consider all states in that range as able to go either way pretty easily. A lead of less than 1%? That really is completely up for grabs. So nobody should read too much into Florida being just barely on one side of the line vs just barely on the other. Either way, Florida is still looking like a tossup.
This does put the “current” model right back to where it has been most of the year though:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
206 |
332 |
| Obama Best Case |
180 |
358 |
In the most recent episode of Curmudgeon’s Corner recorded yesterday and released today, I mentioned that my “gut feel” was that we have seen Romney’s post-primary high water mark, and that we’ll start seeing Obama gaining ground going forward from this point. Despite today’s Florida change, the numbers don’t show that yet. We only have a small amount of post-RNC state level polling, and of course no post-DNC state level polling since that event isn’t even done yet. The right set of things hitting the news and things could break rapidly in Romney’s direction.
In recent times though, challengers have usually lost ground between their convention and the election. Nate Silver recently looked at this in detail. Silver of course points out that this is not a universal rule. 1996 and 2008 both did not fit this pattern. There is still lots of room for the daily ebb and flow of national and international events… and campaign rhetoric… to change the shape of this race. Generally speaking though, if Romney follows the typical pattern, he is done. To date he has never been ahead in this race. He needs to be gaining ground to win. He has no room for the sort of “normal” decline that Silver describes.
Romney needs something big to vault him into a clear lead. His convention was one of the biggest chances for that, and so far it looks like if he got any boost, it was minimal. Assuming we don’t see a very unexpected negative effect coming out of the Democratic convention that ends up helping Romney, this means Romney’s next big chances are the debates… which usually don’t have much of an effect unless someone screws up… or to just hope that Obama just gets pounded by bad news, economic or otherwise, that ends up eliminating Obama’s lead.
Romney could indeed win the debates decisively, or Obama could get hit by those waves of bad news… and that would change things… but like I said, my gut is saying the beginning of September will have marked Romney’s post-primary high water mark in my models. So write that down. I’m going out on that limb. You can all call me on it when it proves to be completely wrong. Which now that I’ve said it “out loud”, will almost certainly happen. :-)
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
One update today, and it is Missouri reversing the move it made on the 25th:
As you can see, polling in Missouri lately has been a bit, uh, wild. The last five polls, which only go back about a week and a half, have ranged from an Obama lead of 1%, to a Romney lead of 17%. That is just all over the place. I’m not sure that public opinion is really swinging quite so much so fast and there is something odd with the polls instead, but we have what we have. Before the two new polls I added today, the five poll average had a Romney lead of 3.8%. The two new polls were very good for Romney and we are now up to a Romney lead of a full 9%!
This is a very quick moment in Romney’s direction. I guess if there was indeed any movement away from the Democrats due to Akin, the backlash is now in full effect. Most of the last year Romney has been ahead in Missouri, but not by much. If the trend of the last few polls holds up, it looks like Obama’s support in Missouri pretty much collapsed and the state may even be heading toward my “Strong Romney” category.
With the polling as all over the place though, I’d reserve judgement on that. The next polls may move in the opposite direction. For the moment though, Missouri is very much in the “Weak Romney” category, meaning Romney has a pretty substantial advantage there, but not so large that he can feel safe completely ignoring the state.
This change once again reduces Obama’s best case:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
235 |
303 |
| Obama Best Case |
180 |
358 |
This means that even in his best case, Obama can’t reach his 365 to 173 victory margin from 2008. Even though Romney has had a good month in our models, Obama is still ahead… but the margins from 2008 are veery unlikely. This will be closer than 2008 unless something dramatic changes.
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
Edit 2012 Sep 6 09:34 UTC to add final note.
One state changing status today, and that is Connecticut, where Obama’s lead has diminished:
Connecticut has been fairly sparsely polled, being generally considered to be a pretty safe Obama state. But there have been a few new polls recently, and they have shown Obama’s lead somewhat diminished from the levels it had been at most of the last year. With today’s update, Obama’s lead in the five poll average drops to 9.6%.
Now, that is still a pretty substantial lead, but it moves Connecticut from my “Strong Obama” category to my “Weak Obama” category. In general, this represents states where the candidate has a definite lead, but not so large a lead that it is safe to ignore the state. The right set of events could potentially reduce the lead further and make the state competitive.
Having said that, it would take a pretty substantial change in the dynamics of the race to make Connecticut competitive, so that is not expected. But the slow deterioration of Obama’s margin in the state may still be something to watch.
Since Connecticut neither is nor was a “too close to call” state, the three models I track do not change:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
235 |
303 |
| Obama Best Case |
170 |
368 |
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
Edit 2012 Sep 6 09:33 UTC to fix link in final note.
One change in this update, and for the first time in more than two weeks it is a move in Obama’s direction.
The state that moves this time is indeed Missouri (10 ev), the location of the recent dustup about comments made by Todd Akin. Could some of that be spilling into the presidential poll numbers? Well, I’d be reluctant to say that quite yet. Two of the five polls in the five poll average were taken after the incident last weekend. A PPP poll on the 20th showed Romney up 10% in Missouri. Then a Rasmussen poll on the 22nd showed Obama up 1%. Now, perhaps that was real movement caused by the coverage going on in those days. Or not. The two polls are just not enough to get a good grasp on that.
The addition of the latest poll does drop Romney’s lead in the state in my average to 3.6% though, which is enough to call the state close again. While Obama is still behind here, it is now close enough that putting some effort into trying to win it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable. Having said that, despite a few scattered polls showing Obama leads, Obama has never been ahead here in the five poll average. Obama winning Missouri is unlikely absent large moves nationally pushing toward an Obama landslide.
This does improve what I call Obama’s “best case”:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
235 |
303 |
| Obama Best Case |
170 |
368 |
Obama’s best case now actually exceeds his 2008 results (a 365 to 173 victory). This would require a sweep of all of the close states though, including the ones he is behind in at the moment. That would be Florida (29 ev), North Carolina (15 ev), Tennessee (11 ev) and Missouri (10 ev). In the five poll average at the moment, Romney is ahead by 3.5% in Florida, 0.6% in North Carolina, 4.2% in Tennessee and 3.6% in Missouri.
I’ve always said that a lead less than 5% can disappear overnight with the right events in the news, but still, it is hard to imagine at the moment the kind of news that would get Obama all four of these states.
Florida has bounced back and forth all year. It is easy to imagine it going either way.
North Carolina is more of a stretch. Obama has sometimes been in the lead there, but most of the time Romney has been. But maybe if things go very well for Obama he will manage North Carolina.
Tennessee and Missouri though? Obama has never been ahead in those states. Obama taking leads in either states would be indicative of a huge Romney collapse.
The Republican convention is starting in a few days though. So don’t expect many moves in Obama’s direction in the short term. Unless the convention is a huge disaster, it is much more likely we see more movement toward Romney from now until the Democratic Convention gets under way.
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
There are always a number of these sorts of quizzes floating around in election years. This is the first one I’ve taken this cycle.
I am not surprised by Gary Johnson at the top, or Mitt Romney at the bottom. Kinda surprised by how high Jill Stein ranked. Maybe I will spend more time looking at her than I’d planned. I’d previously considered this a Johnson/Obama race as far as my own vote was concerned. Romney was never in play for me. Not even close.
I’m also surprised though that even though Johnson is my best match of the candidates and their positions, in terms of the parties (I guess based on their platforms?) I match the Democrats much better than the Libertarians. Perhaps this is because officially the Democratic party platform is still against the kinds of human rights and civil liberties abuses Obama now embraces in the name of fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, officially the Libertarians endorse some stuff that is pretty divorced from reality, while Johnson is a bit more moderate. Dunno.
Of course, Washington State will go for Obama no matter how I vote unless things go very very wrong for Obama in the next couple of months. So my vote is basically just academic.
For anybody else wanting to take the quiz, it is here. Enjoy. Report back on your results. :-)
I mentioned yesterday that several states were right on the edge of tipping if things went Romney’s way. Right on cue, a couple new polls and the biggest one, Florida, flips over to Romney…
For the past few months Florida has been leaning toward Obama, but only by the slightest of margins. Now the five poll average shows a Romney lead in the state for the first time since May.
Now, I will point out that the poll that pushed the five poll average over the center line was one from Foster McCollum that some places are treating as an outlier and therefore are not including in their averages. It has Obama up by 14%. By comparison no other poll has shown a Romney lead of more than 5% since May, and the biggest lead Romney has shown in any Florida poll in the last YEAR is 7%. Nate Silver actually specifically discussed this poll and the problems with it and why some people are excluding it in a recent post.
For my models, if a poll turns up in any of my several sources, I use it. I do not do any specific outlier removal. I let the five poll average do what the five poll average does, and if you have an outlier, it will still be balanced by the other four polls in the average, and soon enough as new polls come in, it will age out of the average anyway. With this poll, Florida shows up in my average with a 2.8% Romney lead. If you excluded it, you would have an 0.2% Obama lead. Either way, the polling shows Florida is very very close and could go either way.
I do count it though, and this means the first change in the “Current” line in my model since May (the last time Florida flipped).
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
235 |
303 |
| Obama Best Case |
180 |
358 |
This puts Romney back where he was in May in terms of the electoral college results if all the states vote according to current polling. That is, Obama wins 303 to 235. As I mentioned yesterday, in terms of his best case (where he wins all the close states and wins 317 to 221) this is the best position Romney has had since February.
Obama is still ahead in this race. But Romney has been gaining on him all month. Things look a lot closer now than they did a few weeks ago. And we’re about to head into convention week for the Republicans, so we should expect a further bounce toward Romney. (Although some analysts think it will be smaller than usual since so many people have already made up their minds.)
The things to watch will be if the bounce is wide spread enough and long lasting enough to actually put Romney in the lead for the electoral college for the first time ever. And if it does, can he keep any of those gains? The convention bounces are usually ephemeral and after the hubbub from both conventions die down, you end up pretty close to where you were before them.
Ohio (18 ev), Colorado (9 ev) and Iowa (6 ev) have Obama leads less than 2% at the moment. Will Romney pick off one of them next? If he is going to, the next couple of weeks are when you would expect it to happen first. So keep watching.
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
So, just as July was very bad for Romney, August has so far been very good for Romney. Today’s move is the state of Michigan, with 16 electoral votes:
Over the course of the last year, Michigan has polled all over the place, ranging from Polls showing Romney ahead by 5%, to polls showing Obama ahead by 18%. A huge range. More recently the five poll average had an Obama lead of 6%. Today’s update pulls that down to 4%. Since that is below my 5% threshold, Michigan once again goes into the “could go either way” category. 4% is just a very slim lead that can disappear pretty easily with the back and forth of the news cycle. This of course improves Romney’s “Best Case” in my model:
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
317 |
221 |
| Current Status |
206 |
332 |
| Obama Best Case |
180 |
358 |
With this update, Romney’s “best case” (where he wins ALL the close states) is better than it has been since February. Over the past few weeks, he has diminished Obama’s lead in several critical states. The “current” line in my model, where each candidate wins all the states they are even slightly ahead in, has stubbornly stayed still at Obama 332 Romney 206 for almost three months now. But getting states close has to happen before states jump over the line.
There are now 9 states where Obama is ahead, but by less than a 5% margin… which can be considered very vulnerable. Of those Obama’s leads in Florida (29 ev), Ohio (18 ev), Virginia (13 ev), Colorado (9 ev) and Iowa (6 ev) are all actually less than *2%*. Those five states could really flip at almost the drop of a hat. They are right on the edge. That is 75 electoral votes right on the verge of going over to Romney’s side of the fence with a few positive news cycles for Romney. And guess what. Move those 75 votes to the other side and Romney wins 281 to 257.
Obama is still significantly ahead in the electoral college analysis at the moment. And Romney has never been ahead in this analysis. But the above serves to show just how quickly things can change. Over the last few weeks things have moved quite nicely in Romney’s direction and there are a lot of states that could easily move further.
This isn’t even close to over yet. The amount of time left is getting shorter all the time, but if Romney keeps things moving in this direction, this could get very interesting!
Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
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