Republicans: Where Do They Go Now?

Great discussion of Nate Silver's Electoral Analysis by Young Turks - video below.

They make the point that Nate made one mistake because he believed the "tipping point" state would be Ohio. This time that wasn't the case - it was Colorado. Even if Obama had lost the popular vote by losing Florida and Virginia, he still would have won the electoral college by winning Colorado. That's remarkable!

Cenk Uyger: Virginia went to President Obama by a larger margin than the president won the national popular vote. Which means that Virginia is more Democratic than the average state. . . . (The Republicans) have nowhere to go! They are up the creek and the paddle got left behind years ago.

Michael Shure: There are states now where the Democrats - we always say Arizona, but I think Arizona is a couple of election cycles away from the Democrats. But Nevada is now a blue state. It's a blue state because of the changing demographic there, the population. It's a union state. Retirees are going further south. It seems to me, even with the high unemployment in Nevada, that it's a blue state.

John Iadarola: Obama lost North Carolina to Romney by about two points, and by contrast, Al Gore, who won the popular vote, lost it by 13 points. So ...(Dems) are making massive inroads even there.

Nate Silver's 538 Blog with Chart (see below on this page)

Cenk Uygur, Michael Shure (political correspondent, TYT and Current TV) and John Iadarola (Host, TYT University) break down the numbers and discuss where the GOP could possibly go from this point, and what they can do.

It's Not Just Nate Silver Predicting Obama to Win Ohio and the Election

source: NYT 538 Blog

Nate Silver is getting pushback and lots of trash talk for sticking to his prediction that Obama will win the electoral college on Tuesday. Right now the prediction is that Obama has 85% chance of winning the electoral college if the election was held today. Actually, the election IS being held today, thanks to early voting, with thousands of new voters participating in every state. The vote may be slightly disrupted in the Northeast thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but plans are in place for mobile truck polling places in places like New Jersey and New York, which are blue states for Obama anyway. Ohio and Pennsylvania were not as affected by the storm, so any disruptions there are more likely to be overcrowded precincts and shenanigans from their Republican overlords in charge of the election.



And Obama is still set to win Ohio and Pennsylvania based on poll after poll. The only people who seem to doubt that are the pundits who are trying to make this into an "undecided" race when the numbers show something else entirely.

All the quotes from Nate, his detractors and other pundit hackery here:

Snark Amendment: Wagering War on Nate Silver
(Yes, the title is a pun not a misspelling)

There's a good reason for Silver's prediction. Look at the Polls:



All Obama needs is to win Ohio and then Romney can't possibly patch together enough votes to win. Yet media hacks like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, MSNBC's Chuck Todd, and several writers at Politico keep calling the race too close to call. They sound just like the wingnuts at Breitbart and Fox, so where is the journalistic integrity? If they won't report the facts then they are useless, and no better than Dick Morris or Karl Rove.

Particularly despicable is Chris Cillizza of Washington Post who moved Ohio to "Toss-Up" status the other day just because Mitt Romney needs the state to win. No real arithmatic involved, just pandering to the right, or perhaps nervousness about some Republican getting mad on the internet, LOL. Oooo, scary!

Washington Post

The Fix is moving Ohio from “lean Obama” to “tossup” in our presidential ratings amid a slew of polling that suggests that the race has tightened over the past month, even as the incumbent retains the slightest of edges.
. . . After reviewing all of the available public polling data as well as talking to operatives in both parties about the private polls they are privy to, we are convinced that Ohio is a 1-3 point race in President Obama’s favor at the moment.
That — coupled with the state’s electoral history and the absolute necessity for Romney to win the state if he wants to be president — leads us to move it back to the “tossup” category.

In response, numbers guy Sam Wang of Princeton wrote a piece called Perverse media incentive watch: Chris Cillizza

...Cillizza is hardly alone. A few days ago, Wolf Blitzer at CNN cited a single Ohio poll, done by his own organization, showing Obama up by 4%. He then proceeded to call this a "tie," revealing an amazing inability to interpret a simple number. Compounding this is the fact that dozens of polls have been conducted in Ohio. The odds of an Obama lead are extremely high. So why does he persist?
The news media have an incentive to fuzz up the picture: ratings and profit. A message that the cake is fully baked does not automatically bring back the viewers. Without the artificial suspense, Cillizza and Blitzer are put in a position of having to say something substantive or interesting that gets beyond a horserace number. Think how much work that would be.
The same problem extends to the aggregation of polling data, which many sites do (FiveThirtyEight, Oct. 31). But think of all the headlines you have seen about "Romney ahead nationally," "Obama pulls ahead in Wisconsin," "it's a dead heat," and other permutations. Each of these headlines was based on a single poll. But aggregation would lead to fewer news stories - and less of the breathless horserace coverage we are used to.

Today Wang stuck to his guns, writing:

President Obama is peeling away. As you can see from the electoral vote (EV) estimator, he is the candidate with the momentum, not Romney. In terms of EV or the Meta-margin, he's made up just about half the ground he ceded to Romney after Debate #1. And the indicators are still headed straight up.
A few days ago, the word was that Team Romney was buying ads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. If he wins either of those states I will eat a bug. Ohio...a really big bug. And yes, I will post a photo.
Today I'll address a common concern among the commentariat: will President Obama lose the popular vote? Steve Lombardo is on the case with some Excel curve fitting of a quality that cannot even identify the Debate #1 bounce. Hmmm, someone take his keys away.
Anyway, the short answer: I estimate Romney's chance of winning the popular vote at 6%, odds of 16-1 against.

Here is the Princeton breakdown of states and electoral votes. Looks like Sam Wang won't have to eat a bug.


Another projection by the University of Illinois, Urbana, Election Analytics gives a similar result as Wang and Nate Silver:


Still not convinced? How about four different oddsmakers on Predictwise.com:



So there it is.

David Rothschild writes on Yahoo's The Signal: All eyes on—where else?—Ohio

Since the final presidential debate, 15 polls have surveyed voter opinion in Ohio, the state that is more likely than any other to determine the election. President Barack Obama leads former Gov. Mitt Romney in 13 of them. The candidates tied in one, and Romney leads in one. Those last two polls were both conducted by Rasmussen, one of the more right-leaning polling institutions, as FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver has documented.

No one is saying Ohio is a walk for the president. The Huffington Post's Pollster and the RealClearPolitics average both have Obama leading with 51.2 percent among those who express a preference for either major candidate. There is still time for a shift toward Romney, and it's always possible that there is a systematic bias in the polls.

But I don't think it's likely. Historically, polls have been pretty accurate this close to the election. Based only on these surveys, the Signal gives Obama a 75 percent chance of victory in Ohio. When we factor in prediction markets, that figure ticks up a small amount, to 77 percent.

None of these analysts should be vilified for doing simple mathematical algorithms based on dating that other people provide to them. What is much more worrying is the press spinning numbers in a way they know to be DISHONEST just three days before a major election.

All Over but the Shouting for Romney

It's all over but the shouting. Well, except the debates, but I don't think those are going to make much difference. Maybe it's just all over but the crying, recriminations, blame game, and circular firing squad. Well, actually all that has started even in the national media, so we have to look away when it becomes embarrassing. And try not to enjoy it too much, heh . . .

Whatever: the fact remains that many of the Electoral Maps are beginning to look the same as the race tightens up and early voting is beginning in many states. The idea that this is still a "horse-race" between Romney and Obama, or that many states are in the "toss-up" category is probably bogus. I don't rule out voter suppression or election day shenanigans, but Romney almost needs to win every swing state in order to get to 270 electoral votes, and I just don't see how that could happen at this point.

Business Insider quotes Romney saying last week: "I’m very pleased with some polls, less so with other polls, but frankly at this early stage, polls go up, polls go down."

Yep, polls do go up and down, yet many voters are locking in their choices by getting to a voting booth now or sending in their absentee ballots. The election is "happening now," as Wolf Blitzer likes to say.

Business Insider also points out the pitfalls of Romney's almost impossible path to victory because every state they mention is leaning Obama at the present time. If Romney loses one, he basically loses all of them.

Florida is a virtual must-win for Romney. If he loses, he would have to take swing states Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Nevada and Virginia to get past 270. That's an extremely illogical path to victory — especially because two of those states (Ohio and Wisconsin) have moved to the "lean Obama" column on the RCP average.

. . . Without Ohio, Romney has to win Florida, as well as New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.

. . . if Romney loses [Virginia] he'll have to hang onto Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa and Colorado as the most plausible path to victory. If Ohio keeps leaning as left as it has been lately, Romney will have to do something implausible — like steal away Michigan or Pennsylvania, two states where Obama has a huge advantage.

. . . If Romney cannot win North Carolina, it's a twofold kick in the gut. First, it would likely mean he's not performing well in other, less-reliable Republican states. Second, he'd have to hold onto Ohio, Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Iowa and Colorado to get to 270.

. . . Without Colorado, Romney would have to hold onto Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada.

So there it is - even if Romney holds onto Colorado or North Carolina, what are the chances of all those other states going his way? His chances are slim to none. Obama wins. End of story. I'm not taking anything for granted - just look at the maps!

Nate Silver's 538 Blog on New York Times


CNN Election Map


Real Clear Politics Map

Romney Losing in Ohio, Race Tightens in Arizona

This morning Nate Silver on 538 gives Obama an 81.9% chance of winning.

He gives Romney just an 18.1% chance of winning.

His "Nowcast" says that if the election were to be held today, Obama would have a 97.8% chance of winning.

Well, actually the election IS being held today because most states have early voting or absentee voting.

Romney has been on a bus tour of Ohio this week, but they may be pulling their advertising out of Ohio to save money because the push isn't working. When you read about how dreadful the rallies are for Romney in that state, it becomes apparent why it might be a lost cause:

From the New York Times

On Wednesday, the Romney campaign reserved $3.4 million worth of advertising time in eight swing states. Nearly half of that — more than $1.5 million — was for Virginia. The rest was spread across Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin. His total ad spending for the week is more than $10 million.

Ohio isn't listed. Now it could be that SuperPac money will rush in with more advertising, but at some point the Republicans will shift towards the down-ticket races instead.

When you read about some of his rallies in Ohio its pretty clear why enthusiasm is evaporating. Read, for instance, this devastating snapshot from The Atlantic:

In the Columbus suburb of Westerville, Romney began his day in a high-school gymnasium bedecked with a confounding array of slogans. A whirling "debt clock" raced upward from 16 trillion; video monitors read "Victory in Ohio"; a bright-blue banner professed "We Need a Real Recovery"; and a powder-blue banner stated "We Can't Afford Four More Years." The governor, John Kasich, welcomed him to the stage with a whiplash-inducing mixed message: "Ohio's coming back! Our families are going back to work!" he said, extolling the state's fast-improving and better-than-average unemployment rate. And then, quickly turning dour: "But every day I have to face the headwinds from this president."

Romney's native-son celebrity endorser, golf legend Jack Nickalus, then gave an excruciating 10-minute speech. Nicklaus, now 72 and a Florida resident, is nicknamed "The Golden Bear" after his Columbus-area high-school mascot, and the crowd held signs reading "The Golden Bear for Romney-Ryan." Romney told the crowd he believed Nicklaus to be "the greatest athlete of the 20th century," inviting some ridicule from the sports world, and gave a mostly lifeless 20-minute spiel in which he assured voters he would not lower their taxes. [b]"By the way, don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I'm also going to get rid of deductions and exemptions," he said.

Nancy Pelosi was on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow last night hinting that Obama might have a chance in Arizona now, and AP is reporting the Dems may start to advertise there. That would be huge and would give Obama another path to victory.

AP Story

Signaling confidence, Obama's team is considering competing in Arizona.

Obama looked at competing in Arizona in 2008, but decided against it because of the support there for home state Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee. Obama still won 45 percent of the vote.

This year, Obama's team talked early on about running in Arizona, which offers 11 electoral votes, but it never did. Now, with an internal Democratic poll showing Obama narrowly leading Romney, Obama's team might make a play for the state that has seen a 160,000 increase in voter registrations by Democratic-leaning Hispanics over the past four years.

Buying television time in Phoenix, the state's largest city, is expensive and Obama advisers are closely watching their finances.

That's not to say that competing in Arizona would be all about winning: going up on the air in the state — or sending the president in to campaign there, could force Romney to spend valuable resources defending a state he should be able to count on in the quest to reach 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory.

If any other red states begin to move into blue territory, then it's over for Romney. I think lots of Republicans here in Tennessee are going to vote for Obama, we may actually go 50-50 this time.

Obama Leading in Polls as Clock Ticks

The NBC/WSJ/Marist Poll that came out on September 13 gives Obama the lead in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia:

From NBC's First Read

In both Florida and Virginia, Obama is ahead of Romney by five points among likely voters (including those leaning toward a particular candidate), 49 percent to 44 percent.

In Ohio, the president’s lead is seven points, 50 percent to 43 percent.

Among a larger pool of registered voters, Obama’s advantage over Romney slightly increases to 7 points in Virginia, 8 in Florida and 9 in Ohio.

. . . Romney likely needs to capture at least two of these states, if not all three, to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.

By comparison, Obama can reach 270 by winning just one or two of these battlegrounds – on top of the other states already considered to be in his column.

(Obama also has an additional path to victory without any of these three states if he wins the toss-up contests of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.)

Public Policy Polling reports that Obama has a five point lead in Virginia over Romney:

PPP's newest Virginia poll finds Barack Obama leading by 5 points, 51-46. Obama's lead is unchanged from a month ago when we found him leading 50-45 in the state. He may not be seeing a bump from the convention in the state at this point, but he was in a pretty good position to begin with.

Virginia continues to look like it may be something of a firewall state for Obama. PPP has now polled it 9 times this cycle, and President Obama has led by at least 4 points on all 9 of the polls. He's been ahead by 5 points, 5 points, 8 points, and 8 points over the course of the four surveys we've conducted in 2012.

However, we must be cautious in our reading of such polls, lest we jinx the results with too much idealistic hope. I plead guilty of being optimistic, along with Nancy Pelosi who said this weekend: "If the far right thought that Romney could win, they might be more enthusiastic about him. . . He’s not going to be president."

And then there's the story from Politico that the Romney camp is imploding and throwing senior adviser Stuart Stevens under the bus as the scapegoat. More about that here:
Snark Amendment: Romney Camp Chaos

Conversely there are the Romney-side Republican naysayers who dismiss all polls as inaccurate or untrue because in their state of denial they can't accept a scenario in which Obama might be chosen by the people for a second term. For them, Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo had this message:

I’ve been watching elections professionally for going on two decades.
From a fair amount of experience I’ll say one thing: if your theory is based on some sort of systematic error on the part of most pollsters, you’re almost certainly in for a really long election night.

Indeed!

Nate Silver on on NYT 538 blog writes in "Watching the Clock and Awaiting the Unknown" that we should just watch the polls day by day, and in time all would be revealed.

Each day that Mr. Romney fails to make gains in the polls will count as an opportunity lost for him. And with each passing day, the model will become slightly more confident that a small lead in the polls will translate into an Electoral College victory for Mr. Obama, since the error in the polls becomes smaller as we get closer to Nov. 6.

It’s also worth tracking the number of undecided voters remaining in the race. The model assumes that overall uncertainty in the forecast is a function of the number of undecideds, in addition to the time left until Election Day.

. . . The average bookmaker now makes Mr. Obama about a 75 percent favorite to win re-election, almost exactly as the FiveThirtyEight forecast now does.

Silver does warn about believing all the comparisons to past races, making "if...then" statements about what will happen. For example, Republicans are trying to compare Obama to Dukakis, as reported by David Weigel of Slate at the Values Voter Summit in Washington:

. . . conservatives are talking themselves into optimism. “Before you decide the election is over based on September polls,” writes Mike Huckabee in an email to supporters, “remember that coming out of the 1988 Democratic convention, Gallup showed an insurmountable 17-point lead for that great former president, Michael Dukakis.”

Walking around the conference, I heard the Tale of Dukakis again and again. But the story leaves out how George H.W. Bush’s convention came after Dukakis, and he made the most of the opportunity to erase that lead. Like every “maybe this time will be like that time” analysis, it leaves out the demographic and culture shifts that have made it easier for a Democrat to put together 270 electoral votes.

Nate Silver says to take all such analysis, both pro-Romney or anti-Romney, with a grain of salt. As he explains it:

I would urge some caution if you come across analyses that take the form: “No candidate has won when trailing in the polls by X amount as of Y date, subject to conditions P and Q”.

These analyses may convey something of the right spirit, in that they emphasize that the polls have a history of being pretty accurate after Labor Day and the conventions. But they do it with much more specificity than is warranted. There is no magic date when polls go from being inaccurate to accurate, and no exact threshold at which a lead in the polls goes from being surmountable to insurmountable.

Rather, it all exists along a probabilistic spectrum, with a candidate’s chance of winning primarily a function of the size of his lead, the time remaining until Election Day and the number of undecideds left in the electorate.

So I guess he is trying to give the Republicans some hope that Obama's lead isn't insurmountable, but we do know that most voters have made up their minds, and I don't lean towards the "undecideds" being relevant the way Silver does.

Polling Shows: Obama Bounces, Mitt Deflated

 Here is Nate Silver's graph as of today, September 7, 2012 from the New York Times.

 As you can see, Obama (the blue line) is on the upswing, while Romney is going down, down, down.

And Silver just posted more good news for Obama - he is bouncing in the polls.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Hints of Obama Convention Bounce

Mr. Obama has gained two or three points in polls conducted essentially halfway through his convention suggests that his gains could eventually be larger, perhaps on the order of five points, once the surveys fully reflect post-convention data. Typically, the bounce grows over the course of the convention, peaking in interviews conducted just a day or two after it.

The caveat is that — and yes, this reflects my personal, subjective view — I thought the speeches delivered by Mrs. Obama and Mr. Clinton were stronger than the one given by Mr. Obama himself, and that Democrats’ momentum seemed to peak on Wednesday night rather than on Thursday. Then, Mr. Obama got a mediocre jobs report on Friday.

The better question, then, is not whether the movement in the polls toward Mr. Obama is “real,” but rather how much more of it (if any) he will get, and how long it persists.

Obviously, no one knows if the bounce will persist, but still - it's better than Romney, who got no bounce - nada, zip, zero - from his own Convention.

Silver writes:

What’s a bit more worrisome for Mr. Romney is that Gallup’s reporting of the head-to-head results in its poll occurs over a lengthy seven-day window, meaning that only a minority of the interviews in the poll were conducted before the major speeches at the Democratic convention.
In fact, most of the interviews in the poll were conducted just after the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., a period in which Mr. Romney should have been enjoying a convention bounce of his own.

The Gallup Organization came to the same conclusion, writing on September 4:

Mitt Romney received no bounce from last week's Republican National Convention, as the 46% of registered voters who supported him in Aug. 31-Sept. 3 Daily tracking is essentially the same as the 47% who preferred him in Aug. 24-27 tracking, the four days preceding the convention.

. . . The lack of a bounce is consistent with Gallup's immediate post-GOP convention reaction poll, showing Americans giving Romney's acceptance speech, and the convention more generally, rather muted ratings.
Gallup's standard seven-day rolling average of voter presidential preferences has shown Obama at 47% and Romney at 46% each day since Aug. 29.

But as of today, Obama is bouncing for Gallup, too:

GALLUP DAILY
Sep 4-6, 2012 – Updates daily at 1 p.m. ET; reflects one-day change

Obama Approval
52%
+3

Obama Disapproval
43%
-2

Presidential Election
Obama
48%
+1

Romney
45%
-1

7-day rolling average

Of course people still need to VOTE ~ so get registered, get your proper ID, find your polling place, and show up on election day!!!