Posts published in July, 2012

Pennsylvania Flaunts Its Importance

By Nate Silver

As The New Republic’s Nate Cohn has observed, the presidential campaigns — especially Mitt Romney’s — have spent conspicuously little in advertising in a state that is traditionally regarded as one of the keys to the election, Pennsylvania.

This could reflect some tactical quirk — one campaign trying to lull the other into a false sense of security, for instance.

But assume for the moment that Mr. Romney’s campaign has decided that Pennsylvania is not a fruitful path to electoral victory. Is this a sensible conclusion? Personally, I don’t think so.

Pennsylvania won’t be the easiest state for Mr. Romney to win. As of Monday, our forecast model gave him only about a 20 percent chance of doing so. And there are some disadvantages to his trying to compete there.

First, it’s hard to move votes in Pennsylvania. Between blacks (and college students) in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on the one hand, and the culturally conservative voters in central Pennsylvania on the other, a lot of the votes there are preordained. There are certainly some swing voters in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs, but in general the demographics of the state make turnout there a bit more important than persuasion.

Second, the polls have been more consistent in Pennsylvania than in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Mr. Obama has led each of the last 16 polls in Pennsylvania, but his margin was in the single digits in all but one of them. Greater consistency in polling also reduces the uncertainty in the forecast.

Nevertheless, our model classifies Pennsylvania as a “tipping point state,” which could conceivably be decisive in the electoral outcome. In fact, it ranked Pennsylvania as the second-most important state as of Monday.
Read more…

July 30: Forecast Stays Steady With 99 Days to Go  | 

We crossed the 100-day barrier over the weekend. Americans will decide on their next president on Nov. 6, 99 days from Monday.

Though there have been some interesting developments in polls at the state level, the overall condition of the race remains about the same. President Obama is clinging to a lead of about two points in the average of national surveys, with perhaps a slightly greater advantage in some key swing states.

The national tracking polls continue to be mediocre for Mr. Obama, but on the other hand, some surveys from polling firms that measure the race on a more occasional basis show stronger numbers for him. A Democracy Corps poll released on Monday, for instance, gave him a four-point lead over Mr. Romney nationally, tying Mr. Obama’s largest lead in that particular survey. We think that most of the apparent movement in national polls toward or against Mr. Obama in recent weeks likely reflects little more than statistical noise. According to our model, his chance of winning the Electoral College is 66.9 percent as of Monday, little changed from 67.4 percent on Saturday.

Louisiana: Democrats in Registration Only

By Nick Corasaniti

Today, we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today’s stop: Louisiana, the Pelican State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Wayne Parent, a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, and Robert Mann, a professor of mass communication at L.S.U.

When 26-year-old Walker Hines announced that he was switching his party affiliation to Republican from Democrat in 2010, he gave the Republican Party a majority in a Louisiana chamber for the first time since Reconstruction.

The young Mr. Hines’s decision was emblematic of Louisiana’s political transformation: it had become as red as its famous crawfish.

Much like its Gulf Coast brethren, Louisiana has flipped to a solid red state from a solid blue state over the past 20 years. The most recent FiveThirtyEight projections give Mitt Romney a 99.7 percent chance of carrying the state, and Republican presidential candidates have carried Louisiana easily since George W. Bush. In 2008, Louisiana was one of four Republican states in the country to vote more in favor of John McCain (58.6 percent) than Mr. Bush in 2004 (56.8 percent).

But while Louisiana votes consistently with the Deep South, its conservative engine is made up of slightly different parts, some of which, when viewed in isolation, falsely appears to make Louisiana more pink, or purple, than red.

Of the roughly 2.9 million registered voters in the state, 1.4 million are registered as Democrats, while about 789,000 are registered Republicans and another 694,000 registered as “other.” Even if every “other” voter sided with the Republicans, it would appear that Louisiana is a hotly contested state. So how is every major state office held by a Republican? Read more…

Which Olympic Records Get Shattered?  | 

In track and field, athletes compete not just against one another, but against the intrinsic barriers of human achievement. At the London Olympics, the runners and jumpers and javelin-throwers will set fewer world records than the swimmers. But the ones they do set are more likely to survive the test of time. Read more in the Sunday Review.

July 28: Missouri Slipping Away From Democrats

By Nate Silver

Missouri, the state that was once considered the nation’s ultimate bellwether, looks as though it is likely to be out of reach for President Obama this year, unless there is a significant shift toward him in the final 100 days of the campaign.

A Mason-Dixon poll of the state, released on Saturday, gave Mitt Romney a nine-point lead there. Mr. Romney’s nine-point lead matches his advantage from another poll of the state, conducted by the firm We Ask America, which was released earlier this week.

The forecast model now estimates that Mr. Romney has an 88 percent chance of winning Missouri in November. And Missouri has fallen off the list of tipping point states, meaning that it is very unlikely to be a decisive state in determining the winner of the Electoral College. The cases where Mr. Obama wins Missouri are probably those where he is headed toward some sort of near-landslide in the national race, like because of an unexpected rebound in the economy. Read more…

July 27: Ohio Polls Show Trouble for Romney

By Nate Silver

I wrote earlier this week about some of the challenges in comparing state polls and national polls. Sometimes, apparent differences between the two sets of numbers can result from methodological quirks of the polling firms that are active in each arena, as well as random sampling error.

With that said, we are starting to see a bit of a gap between our Electoral College and popular vote forecasts based on the latest polling data this week — one which potentially favors President Obama.

In general, the polls from nonswing states this week, ranging from New Jersey to North Dakota, were mediocre for Mr. Obama. But his numbers held up better in swing states.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Ohio, where there were two new polls out on Friday. One of them, from the firm We Ask America, gave Mr. Obama an eight-point lead there. Another, from Magellan Strategies, put Mr. Obama up by two points. Read more…

What the New G.D.P. Figures Mean for the Election

By Nate Silver

Let me begin with an important reminder. Unless you have a particular interest in economic or political forecasting, the major upshot of Friday’s gross domestic product report, which estimated that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent in the second quarter, is simply that the American economy is still not doing very well.

What economists call “trend” or average growth is supposed to be closer to 3 percent. Moreover, after many past recessions, we’ve had above-trend growth in the year or so after the recession to help make up for the lost productivity in the economy.

We didn’t have that this time around. After the latest revisions to the data, only two quarters since the recession officially ended came in above that 3 percent threshold; all the others were below it.

So, there remains an output gap of about $800 billion dollars. That’s the difference between what economists think annual G.D.P. would be if the economy were at its full productive capacity, and what it actually is.

But we concern ourselves with the more narrow question of election forecasting at this blog. On that front, I agree with other analysts who suggest that the G.D.P. numbers don’t contain all that much new information. Read more…

New York: Not as Blue as It Could Be

By Sarah Wheaton

Today we continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of the peculiarities that drive the politics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Today’s stop: New York. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Steven A. Greenberg, the Siena College pollster and political consultant, and Bruce Gyory, a consultant at Corning Place Communications and an adjunct professor of political science at the University at Albany.

New York’s Democrats are underachievers.

Sure, Barack Obama won the 2008 election in New York with 62.2 percent of the vote – behind only Hawaii, Vermont and Washington, D.C. – and Andrew M. Cuomo took the governor’s mansion in 2010 with 62.6 percent.

But in a state where almost half of the voters are registered Democrats, giving them a 2-to-1 advantage over registered Republicans, is that really such an accomplishment?

To understand the state’s politics, it makes sense to divide New York into three regions: New York City, the downstate suburbs (Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, Westchester and Rockland Counties just north of the city), and the sprawling, diverse upstate region.

As far as Democratic performance goes, New York City, the state’s liberal economic engine, is the biggest slacker of all. A city that has not voted for a Republican for president since Calvin Coolidge in 1924 has not elected a Democratic mayor since 1989. The five boroughs also don’t vote their weight: As Mr. Gyory notes, in 2008 New York City made up about 42 percent of the state’s population, 38 percent of its registered voters and 34 percent of the vote – and that figure actually shows improvement over previous years.

Upstate New York, on the other hand, contributes 42 percent to 46 percent of the vote, despite having about 36 percent of the population and 39 percent of the registered voters, Mr. Gyory said. Read more…

July 26: The Calm Before Critical Economic News

By Nate Silver

Thursday was a rare day of decent economic news for President Obama. The Department of Labor showed initial unemployment claims declining, and the stock market was up more than 200 points as investors bought into assurances by the chief of the European Central Bank that he would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro zone.

A series of critical economic reports is set to be released in the next week, including the government’s initial estimate of second-quarter G.D.P. growth on Friday, and the monthly jobs report a week from Friday.

In addition, the Federal Reserve will hold a meeting next week, during which it could plausibly choose to enact a third round of quantitative easing.

The polling news was mixed for the candidates. A survey in Missouri showed Mitt Romney well ahead there, and another in New Jersey showed a smaller lead for Mr. Obama than others in the state. But Mr. Obama got a stronger number in a Nevada poll, a more critical state in the Electoral College, which put him ahead by five points there.

Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the Electoral College rose in our model, to 66.4 percent from 65.0 percent, mostly because the stock market gain slightly bolstered the model’s economic index.

July 25: Romney Gains in Tracking Polls

By Nate Silver

I am in the midst of explaining how the FiveThirtyEight forecast model evaluates state polls along with national polls in an effort to determine where the overall race stands. I suppose I think that the national polls sometimes receive a bit too much attention.

But we, at FiveThirtyEight, are not dogmatic about this. The model does use national polls as well — including the various tracking polls that are released on a daily or weekly basis, and sometimes they can have a discernible influence on the forecast.

Mitt Romney has seen some improvement in these tracking polls over the last week. The Rasmussen Reports tracking poll had him four points ahead of Barack Obama as of Thursday. Galllup’s tracking poll showed him moving back into a one-point lead after Mr. Obama had held the advantage for most of the past few weeks.

Both the Rasmussen Reports and Gallup polls have been slightly Republican-leaning relative to the consensus of surveys. But that is not true of two polling firms that release weekly tracking polls, Public Policy Polling and YouGov, and both of those polls showed Mr. Romney gaining as well.

These tracking polls are subject to the same random noise that any other surveys are — and sometimes the movement they appear to show can be spurious. But the one nice thing about them is that they do provide a steady basis for comparison. Our hope, of course, is that the forecast model can weigh their pluses in minuses in a sensible way.

Add it up, and Mr. Romney has gained some ground in the FiveThirtyEight forecast over the past few days. His chances of winning the Electoral College were listed at 35.0 percent by the model as of Wednesday night’s forecast, his best figure since the June 26 release of our numbers.