Thurs 10/25 3pm EST Sam Wang/Princeton: Obama Is A LOT More Likely to Win:
David Brooks – now with Ro-mentum!
October 25th, 2012, 10:30am by Sam Wang
"
Welcome, readers of FiveThirtyEight, Ezra Klein, and Votamatic!)
It was fun to learn of David Brooks’s addiction to polling data. He spends countless hours on them, looking at aggregators, examining individual polls, and sniffing poll internals. From all of this, what has he learned?
1.Today, President Obama would be a bit more likely to win.
2.There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney.
(Emphasis mine.)
I am having a sad. All of that effort, and his two conclusions still have two major errors. Evidently he does not read the Princeton Election Consortium. Let us dissect this.
1. President Obama would be a bit more likely to win. This is false – he’s a lot more likely to win. Look at the Princeton Election Consortium’s EV histogram, which tabulates all 2.3 quadrillion possible combinations of states to give a clear snapshot of the race:
In a race today, President Obama would win with about 90% probability. The true probability is even higher, since the Meta-Analysis does not correct for individual pollster errors. We could – but the political blowback from unskewing polls is too large.
2. There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney. Ah, yes…Ro-mentum! Bobo has taken the bait. He is probably looking at other aggregators, where for various reasons (q: do you want me to write about that sometime?) the real trends are harder to see. Let’s roll the instant replay.
As you can see, Ro-mentum ended around October 11th, the date of the VP Biden-Ryan debate and reversed around October 16th, Debate #2. Now the median EV expectation is at a plateau around Obama 293 EV, Romney 245 EV. Viewed through the all-important Electoral College, Obama has a Popular Vote Meta-Margin lead of 1.5%. This measure is precise to within <0.5%, far better than any single poll. If anything, the race is starting to look a bit static.
Of course, some change may well happen over the coming 12 days. Based on past races (see “The Presidential Predictor sharpens,” Sept. 29), here is how much movement we can expect....."
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/25/do-you-understand-polls-as-well-as-david-brooks/#more-7922
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