"John McCain is making no progress in his pursuit of the White House." (Nate Silver)

[jefferson_dem]

Today's Polls, 10/27

John McCain is making no progress in his pursuit of the White House. Our model now projects Barack Obama to win 351 electoral votes to John McCain's 187, and to win the Electoral College 96.7 percent of the time to McCain's 3.3 percent. Both numbers are unchanged from yesterday.

Let's take a look at the polls, and then run through a couple of big-picture themes:



Theme #1. If the national polls are tightening, there is no evidence of it in the state numbers. If the national tracking polls moved at all today, they moved slightly in McCain's direction, as he gained ground in the Rasmussen and Research 2000 polls, whereas the other six trackers were essentially flat. However, there has really been no sign of tightening in the state polls.

Our model places more emphasis on state polling, and there's a pretty good reason why: they give us a lot more data to look at. Today's for instance, there were 3,539 "fresh" interviews conducted (e.g. those that were not already accounted for in previous' days tracking polls) between eight national polls that we added to our database. By contrast, there were 22,881 fresh interviews conducted between 31 new state polls.

If the state polls aren't showing movement toward McCain, then it is probably the case that any perceived movement in the national polls is sampling noise. If anything, in fact, the state polls are showing movement toward Obama on balance, not just in battleground states like Virginia, but also in non-battlegrounds as diverse as New York, Oklahoma, Oregon and Arizona.

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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/todays-polls-1027.html

[BeatleBoot]

1. 2008: The Year Nate Silver became a household name

[jefferson_dem]

2. Cool, huh.

Dude. Done. Good.

[Occam Bandage]

7. Hey, no fair. We baseball geeks loved him first!

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jefferson_dem]

4. President Barack Hussein Obama!

Sounds great, eh! You'll learn to love it.

And how about you grab a handfull "fuck off" on your way out the door.

[BlooInBloo]

5. But... but.... DUers keep saying the race is TIGHTENING!

:rofl:

[Hamlette]

6. I liked his 2/2/2 rule

In order to conclude the Electoral College has tightened to the point where the outcome on November 4 is at least moderately uncertain, I would want to see the following between now and the election. Call it the 2/2/2 condition:

John McCain polling within 2 points in 2 or more non-partisan polls (sorry, Strategic Vision) in at least 2 out of the 3 following states: Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania.

If this condition is met, then I think there could be some drama on Election Night (though by no means would McCain be the favorite). If not, then it's very hard to imagine McCain winning.