2012 Race for the White House II: The Two Towers

JohnR tomwilhelm
As always, don't pay attention to individual polls - pay attention to trends. You never know when an abnormal result is a sign of a trend or an aberration until you've had at least a couple more results to make sense of it.

 

Absolutely. There are outlier polls. This is one of them. Heck, the polls are only now starting to have any relevance to November results whatsoever, historically speaking.

I pay attention to Nate Silver. That's about it.

 

I don't know, maybe. As the other poster mentioned, we have to see a few more of these so that we can follow the trends.

 

There are already lots of polls. This is an extreme outlier among them.

 

Well, as you stated, polls are just starting to become relevant. So this will be an important demographic to watch moving forward.

 

Maybe a fair and balanced "Source" you can trust?

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/09/obama-vs-romney-how-electoral-college-math-adds-up/

 

This poll had 600 adults, let's say 300 women then. Assume conservatively that Obama leads women by 55 to 45 nationally. Assume that this poll randomly favored Mitt, because sometimes that's how the coin flips. You'd only get a result like this 1% of the time.

So either this is a very long odds result, or women are now flocking for reasons unknown to Romney, or it was a badly constructed poll that tilted toward conservative voters.

 

And yet the media narrative continues to be "it's gonna be a nailbiter...!"

 

The media stopped caring about the news a long time ago. Now they only care about ratings and "This election is a walk in the park for Obama" doesn't get them ratings, but "This is going to be a nailbiter!" does get them ratings.

 

RCP has the incumbent with a 2.2 lead right now. I think it will be very close.

 

Ha. I feel like with Fox News, I can trust the "opinion" pieces more than the "news" articles, because the writers tend to have second careers as strategists or authors, and they don't want to damage their brands TOO much, whereas with unsigned "news", they can just let their on-air graphics interns go nuts with the charts and captions.

This column is actually okay though, since the main point of reference is RCP, which averages all the polls, which is how we should look polling data at any given time.

 

What papers? Newspapers? Nobody read those anymore... Why bother if you can always find a blog you agree with...

 

Pretty much what they always have. The Democratic nominee always starts with that kind of number as a base. Really tells us very little. It will come down to a bunch of nailbiters in swing states on election day, like it usually does.

 

253-170.

And national polls are useful because they are a pretty reliable indicator of how the popular vote will come out, which in turn is a pretty good indicator of the EC vote as well.

Anyway, Romney will need a near-sweep of the battleground states, though as you often point out, Gary Johnson can make New Mexico interesting, and Pennsylvania's 20 votes can still come into play.

 

I don't.

Here's my electoral prediction:
http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=kYa

Obama wins 341 to 197.

253 to 170, with 115 toss ups.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html

 

If that happens, I will cut off my ear.

 

How do you think it'll break down then? You can use the same site and post your results too.

 

The US doesn't elect presidents by popular vote. It uses electoral college and right now, the electoral college vote isn't close. Since you're using RCP, they have Obama at 253, Romney at 170, and 115 in Swing states.

Dems usually don't start out with this high of a base. Demographics have changed and PA, NM, and NV have pretty much lost their swing state status and several states that were once part of the Republican base, like AZ and CO, have slipped into swing state status.

Don't get me wrong, the popular vote will be fairly close, but that will largely be because Obama is going to lose big in the solid red states, while Romney's losses in blue states won't be as large. As it stands today, Obama leads in all the swing states except Missouri and Arizona, with Florida being a virtual tie.

 

I don't know. It's way too early to make a prediction. My map right now would look very similar to RCP's, in that most of these are swing states that could go either way. But the reason I sort of made fun of your prediction is that current trends do not support it. Yours seems to be a "best-case scenario".