BY NATE SILVER, NEW YORK TIMES, November 3, 2012 -- President Obama is now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday.
Friday's polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida.
The polling results represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a "tossup." A tossup race isn't likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other -- any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses. (The probability of a fair coin doing so is about 1 chance in 50,000.)
Instead, Mr. Romney will have to hope that the coin isn't fair, and instead has been weighted to Mr. Obama's advantage. In other words, he'll have to hope that the polls have been biased in Mr. Obama's favor.
Nate Silver’s Electoral College Forecast: Obama 307 -- Romney 231
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, November 4th 2012 at 11:09AM
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