The Latest Polls
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
As I have posted before, I am glued to Real Clear Politics. (RCP)
The way they average the polls to reduce the impact of erroneous spikes keeps me grounded.
The RCP national average is currently showing Obama with an average 4.8% lead. As an Obama supporter, that's good the hear, but not that interesting. When you get down to the state by state polls, it gets real interesting.
For the first time since August Obama has a lead in Ohio. For the first time since July, really since the general election began, Obama has a shown a sharp upward spike and the lead in the RCP average in Virginia. Obama is even showing a slim lead in North Carolina. Lastly, Obama is showing his first, albeit slim lead in Florida this year.
If the election were held today and the results mimicked the RCP state by state averages, the RCP map starts to look a lot like the maps predicted by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com weeks, if not months ago. History is usually a better indicator for election results than polls, but if these trends continue, the final map could look something like what you see above.
12 comments:
348 electorial to 190??? Holy ass-kicking, Batman.
RCP also had a neat graph of lead over time. Obama has lead by at least a thin margin the last three months, and his lead margin has increased sharply since the 25th!
I'm hoping the trend continues!
It is hard to get too excited (or too depressed, depending on your outlook) because many states are too close to call or within the margin of error. Polling data in the past has been notoriously wrong. That being said, I am still obsessed with RCP, too.
As of 5:00, RCP has Obama/Biden with better than a 5% lead in states totaling 249 Electoral Votes. By my math, that puts him 21 short with 126 up for grabs (and that doesn't count likely states like Minnesota and Wisconsin)
And since Bob posted, Nevada switched to blue in the "no toss-up" map.
Must not celebrate early. Must stay calm. Must not dance naked in streets...
I agree that polls can be wrong, which is why I like the averaging technique. It might still be wrong, but there was so much change here, it is still worth reporting.
Please let this be true, please let this be true...
As of this morning, RCP has Obama up by 5.7%.
Two other good sites: http://www.electoral-vote.com/index.html and www.intrade.com.
Hey, this is kind of cool guys! I just found out my boss, David A. Brown, is running for MSU Board of Trustees for the Libertarians! Pretty neat!
Did you see Silver's post on RCP's bias effecting their poll numbers?
Here.
So there's that...
Well,
If RCP is infact biased toward McCain, I will still look at it with that in mind. If they are biased the good news just got better....although I am not willing to be that optomistic.
Funny thing is, Silver recommends pollster.com, whose map is nearly identical to RCP with the exception of putting a few more states in the swing category instead of Obama and putting the Viginia average toward McCain.
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