On Oct. 11, this blog
posed the question of whether President Obama’s “firewall” in battleground states was all that it was cracked up to be.
At
that point, Mr. Obama still technically held the lead in the
FiveThirtyEight forecast in enough states to give him 270 electoral
votes. But Colorado, Florida and Virginia had turned red in our map,
meaning that our forecast suggested that Mitt Romney had
better-than-even odds of winning them. Iowa was just on the verge of
doing so. And Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just a percentage point or so
in Ohio, which would have collapsed his firewall at its foundation.
Theories
that the decline in Mr. Obama’s polls that followed the first
presidential debate in Denver would somehow skip the swing states were
not looking good — as
dubious as the idea that tornadoes “skip” houses.
Instead,
at that point, Mr. Obama’s position in the FiveThirtyEight forecast had
declined for seven consecutive days. If he stopped the bleeding there,
he might still be the Electoral College favorite, albeit a narrow one.
But it wasn’t clear where the bottom was.
It turned out, however, that the worst was almost over for him. Mr. Obama had one more
terrible day in the polls,
on Friday, Oct. 12, when Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral
College rose to almost 40 percent in the forecast. But that was when
Mr. Romney’s momentum stopped.
Since
then, Mr. Obama’s standing has rebounded slightly. His position in the
national polls has stabilized; although the national polls
continue to tell a different story about the race than the state polls do; it can no longer be said that they have Mr. Obama behind.
(More about that in a moment.)
Meanwhile,
Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in
Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of
least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was
particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable
number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.
There
were 12 polls published on Wednesday among Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and
Wisconsin. Mr. Obama held the lead in 11 of the 12 surveys; the
exception was a survey by the University of Iowa, which had Mr. Obama
down by about one point there, but also had a very small sample size
(about 300 likely voters). On average, Mr. Obama led in the polls of
these states by 3.9 percentage points.
None of this ought to have
been surprising, exactly, if you have been attentive to the polls rather
than the pundits. It was a pretty good day of surveys for Mr. Obama but
not a great one: for the most part, the polls were coming in close to
FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, give or take a modest outlier
here and there.
Rather, the polls in these states confirmed what we already knew: that Mr. Obama remains the favorite in the Electoral College.
Mr.
Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His
chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it
into another term are
equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team
winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play
in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong,
and sometimes they will.
But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that
leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning
the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the
FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.
Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast.
Regular
readers will have seen the chart below once or twice before. It sorts
the competitive states in order of Mr. Obama’s current projected margin
of victory or defeat in each one, keeping a running tally of the number
of electoral votes that Mr. Obama is accumulating.
Ohio remains the
tipping-point state
in the forecast, the one that puts him over the top to 270 electoral
votes. There, Mr. Obama leads by 2.6 percentage points, which should
convert to a victory about 80 percent of the time given the historical
accuracy of polls at this late stage of the race.
Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College without Ohio — a prospect we had
defended as being plausible before — are looking more tenuous based on the most recent polling.
If
Mr. Obama wins Ohio, and all the states above it on the chart, he’d
have 281 electoral votes, meaning that he has 11 to spare. That means he
could shed New Hampshire from his list, along with either Iowa or
Nevada (although not both).
Of these two states, Nevada appears to
be the slightly safer one for Mr. Obama; there, Mr. Obama leads by 3.5
percentage points in the forecast, as opposed to 2.9 percentage points
in Iowa. The polling has also been somewhat more consistent in Nevada
than in Iowa, another factor that the forecast considers in evaluating
the probability of an upset.
One fortunate aspect of these two
particular states, from Mr. Obama’s view, is that they are not very
similar to one another demographically.
Iowa is quite rural.
Nevada occupies a huge geographical territory, but its population is
very urban, mostly living in Las Vegas and its suburbs.
Iowa is
overwhelmingly white, and has a lot of moderate and middle-income, but
highly educated, voters. Nevada certainly has an independent streak, but
winning there usually depends more upon building a 50 percent coalition
among diverse groups and then turning it out to vote. Iowa has a pretty
good economy, all things considered; Nevada’s is still terrible.
Since
Mr. Obama only needs to carry one of these states, it helps him that
they form a diverse portfolio. If Mr. Obama’s turnout operation is
strong, then Nevada should be one of the states
where he benefits the most.
If, instead, Mr. Obama has little “ground game” advantage, but he holds
his own among independent and undecided voters, perhaps persuading them
that the economy has improved enough to merit his re-election, Iowa may
fall for him.
Mr. Romney could also circumvent his need to win
Ohio by carrying Wisconsin, but that is looking tough for him. In Ohio,
Mr. Romney is behind by two or three percentage points, on average, in
the polls. In Wisconsin, Mr. Romney’s better polls have him down by two
or three points, while his worst ones have him six to eight points
instead. There’s still enough upside to winning Wisconsin that Mr.
Romney should not give up on it, in my view, but his chances are down to
12 percent in the forecast, and most of those cases involve outcomes
where he has already won Ohio anyway.
The more debatable cases are
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. Mr. Romney is the clear underdog
in each one. But his campaign has so much money that it probably doesn’t
hurt Mr. Romney much to spend a little bit of it there to maximize
whatever residual chances he might have in case the polls are wrong.
(Arguably, it was a poor strategic decision for Mr. Romney to make a
half-hearted effort to compete in these states.)
Still, for Mr.
Romney to win Michigan, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, the polls would have
to be much further off than they are in Ohio.
It doesn’t help Mr.
Romney, either, that all of these states are in the same part of the
country as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, meaning that they are unlikely to
leapfrog them and become the tipping-point state on Tuesday. If,
hypothetically, Mr. Romney’s polling were a bit better in culturally and
geographically disparate states, like Oregon, New Jersey or New Mexico,
they might represent better targets.
If Mr. Obama were to lose
Ohio (but hold the other states), the tipping-point would then become
Colorado. There, Mr. Obama holds a much more tenuous lead, about one
percentage point in our forecast, which converts to about a 60 percent
chance of winning. But at least it’s a lead rather than a deficit,
whereas Mr. Romney’s non-Ohio paths would require him to win states
where he is now three or four percentage points behind.
Mr. Obama
also remains about a 60 percent favorite in Virginia. Another option
would be Florida, although it is a resource-intensive state and we give
him about a 40 percent chance of winning there.
While state polls
dominated the news on Wednesday, there were also a handful of national
polls out, even as others have been suspended in the wake of Hurricane
Sandy.
On
average, Mr. Obama led by just over one percentage point in these
national polls, although it is an odd distribution, with two polls
showing him up by four or five points, several showing a tied race, and
one (the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll) putting him two points down.
The
FiveThirtyEight model calculates a national poll average, using a more
sophisticated method than the simple average I’ve taken in the chart.
(The model doesn’t “forget” about the Gallup poll, for example, just
because it has been suspended for a couple of days.)
We don’t
usually print this number, because it would sow confusion: our estimate
of the national popular vote, which we do publish, instead represents a
combination of national polls and the
implied standing of the candidates based on state polls.
But,
for what it’s worth, our national poll average shows Mr. Obama up by
about half a percentage point right now. This is within the range of
other Web sites: Real Clear Politics has an exactly tied race in its
national poll average; HuffPost Pollster has Mr. Obama down by
three-tenths of a point; Talking Points Memo has Mr. Obama ahead by
about one percentage point.
Again: we don’t take the average of
the national polls to be tantamount to a forecast of the national
popular vote, since state polls, if considered carefully, can provide
considerable information about the national race as well.
Suppose,
however, that Mr. Obama were to tie Mr. Romney in the popular vote on
Tuesday. The way that the forecast model works, this would require
subtracting some from Mr. Obama in each state in order for the
arithmetic to add up.
Even under these conditions, Mr. Obama would
still be a favorite in the forecast. In fact, he’d be about a 70
percent favorite to win the Electoral College conditional upon the
national popular vote being tied, according to our simulations.
A
tie in the national popular vote is a tolerable condition for Mr. Obama,
in other words. His position is robust enough in states like Ohio that
he has some slack. With a lead of about 2.5 percentage points in the
tipping-point states, Mr. Obama could underperform his state polls by a
point or two and still win.
Conversely, Mr. Romney has few chances to win unless the state polls are systematically wrong.
I
don’t mean for this to sound dismissive; the polling error could quite
easily be correlated across the different states, and the national polls
are one reason to be suspicious of the state polls.
But we’re at
the point now where Mr. Obama may be a modest favorite even if the
national polls are right. Two weeks ago, when Mr. Obama appeared to
trail Mr. Romney by a point or so in the national polls, that would not
have been the case.
Is it possible that Mr. Obama has benefited,
politically, from his handling of Hurricane Sandy? He has gotten high
marks for it so far, according to the
tracking poll run by The Washington Post and ABC News.
Our
database contains roughly a dozen polls that conducted the bulk of
their interviews on Tuesday or Wednesday, after Hurricane Sandy became
the dominant news story. Most of these are state polls, and most were
conducted in states that were isolated from the major effects of the
storm.
Our analysis of the trend lines in the polls suggest that
they have been a somewhat above-average group for Mr. Obama, perhaps
suggesting a percentage point or so of improvement for him.
The
model is not yet pricing in very much of this into its forecast, as
trends like that can occur fairly easily because of statistical noise.
But if the storm has a discernible effect in the polls, it seems more
likely to help Mr. Obama than to hurt him based on what we’ve seen so
far.
This is something to monitor as more national polls come back
online. I think describing the race as a “toss-up” reflects an
uninformed interpretation of the evidence, but there is surely room to
debate how much of a favorite Mr. Obama is. However, Mr. Romney is not
in a position to tolerate any movement in Mr. Obama’s favor given how
close we are to the finish line.
of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip
found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic
blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.”