| If the election were held today and... | Obama | McCain |
| ...all McCain <5% went to Obama | 381 | 157 |
| ...all Obama <5% went to McCain | 286 | 252 |
| Shift since yesterday: | -0 | +0 |
| Shift this week: | -2 | +3 |
Today's Numbers: | Yesterday's Numbers: |
The chart at the left shows the distribution of electoral votes based on statewide polls. The colors represent the gap in the poll. The darker the color, the larger the gap. 50% +1 or 270 Electoral votes are needed to win, out of a possible 538.
This site is really designed to be used along with Electoral-Vote.com. I provide one useful way to interpret the data, but without the information that is provided at that site, you won't get as much use from this chart.
For a complete explanation of the methodology used, see the Electoral-Vote.com polling FAQ. The raw data used to generate the chart is also available there. Please note that other than using the data that they make available, this site is not affiliated with Electoral-vote.com
16 comments:
A nice one-glance map at Zogby. McCain has to win all the purple states and one blue state. Why McCain is in PA, I have no clue.
This article here answers my question. If McCain wins PA...
Hey there, I just finished up my Final Election Report over at http://www.jrosen.wordpress.com and would love you to take a look at it! Thanks and keep up the good work over here!
Diogenes,
That's just paraphrasing the article you posted back on the 20th. The same flaws I saw with the analysis then still apply now.
The average of the five PA polls released today has Obama with a 11 point lead. The Morning Call tracker has had Obama with a lead between 10 and 14 points on every single day since 10/3. Even if McCain manages to tighten things up a bit, it's highly unlikely that he can close that gap.
And remember, PA has a Democratic governor (who is a vocal Obama surrogate, even if he started out as a dedicated Clinton surrogate) and a Democratic Seretary of the Commonwealth, so it would be hard for the election to be stolen there, and if there were any signs of impropriety, you can count on it being investigated thoroughly.
We can come up with nightmare scenarios all day long-- I mean, imagine if Obama lost CA!-- but without some evidence, they are simply idle paranoia. McCain is definitely making a play for PA, but I just don't see any way that he can possibly gain back nearly a point a day over the next 13 day, in a state that has had virtually identical numbers in daily polling for most of the last month. PA is probably the most heavily polled state in the country this cycle, so if there was any real movement towards McCain, you'd likely be seeing it in the polls. At this point, you aren't even seeing any outliers, so I see no reason to assume movement.
Hi Jacob-
Looks good with two caveats... You have my domain wrong. It should be evstrength.blogspot.com. No www needed, and a dot, not a dash between evstrength and blogspot.
Second, I'd personally leave out the paragraph at the end talking about the negative campaigning... I'll admit that I'm biased, but it's pretty hard to argue that both sides have been equally nasty or dishonest in this campaign, so the entire paragraph seems like false equivalence to me. While it's not scientific, these stats on Obama and McCain seem to back up my beliefs on this one. That paragraph also doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the article.
Sorry to nitpick, but false equivalence is rampant in the media today, and it's a pet peeve of mine. I have no problem calling out either candidate for their false attacks, but one side certainly seems to be responsible for the majority of the negative tone of this years campaign.
Nate Silver was on Democracy Now October 23. He starts at 10 minutes in and goes to minute 25 of the podcast/video, talking very fast!. Or you can read the transcript.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/23/the_spreadsheet_psychic_with_fivethreeeightcom_nate
With regard to diogenes' point and other dark non-pollyanna scenarios, the evidence of past history shows us that people just accept the "official" poll result provided (perhaps by Diebold and validated by the Secretary of State), even when the pre-vote polls and even the exit polls give quite different results. The most recent example would be Hillary's upset primary victory in New Hampshire in January 2008.
When the actual vote results come out, everyone forgets about the polls and even the exit polls from 10 minutes before. At that point, you just look stupid saying, "All of the polls had us 10 points ahead…" The results are accepted as "real" and then they will try to explain why all the polls were off by 8 or 9 points.
Polls are even more unreliable this year than in other years, so you could probably fool the people up to a 10% swing.
I sincerely hope the results are closely investigated this time but if the official result in certain areas has McCain up 8% to 10% from all of the polls, we are in trouble. A programmed "surge" for McCain can still upset expectations. I would hope that although this appears to still be technically possible, it is now politically impossible. Particularly if ONLY electronic voting states show a final McCain surge/swing, that would look very suspicious. They would have to have some electronic voting states NOT swing just to maintain some believability.
I roughly agree with Noam Scheiber's quote that Obama has a better than 80% chance of winning. The Republicans won't stop contesting the election, though, and they will use all levers available to them, as they believe the ends justifies the means. There will probably be legal challenges after the election, and incidents on election day.
538 has IN shining blue again on the basis of 2 polls, Big 10 and Survey USA, showing Obama ahead 4-9%.
I disagree with this comment:
"Polls are even more unreliable this year than in other years, so you could probably fool the people up to a 10% swing."
If anything, polls are MORE reliable this time, simply because there are far more of them then ever before. When you average them all togethr, you have a much better snapshot of the election than any single poll could ever give you. There are certainly more wildcards today then there have been in previous elections, but nothing that should account for more than a 2-3% bias towards Obama in the polls due to a possible Bradley effect. I'd actually argue that the bias is probably several points in McCain's favor since cellphones aren't polled and turnout is notoriously hard to poll, and all signs point to Record high Dem turnout and quite possibly record low Rep turnout.
But I suspect that what you meant was that there is enough noise in the polls that the McCain campaign can make a convincing argument that this years pols are unreliable, in which case I think you're probably right.
Obama is up!
Anyone think it's fallout from Wardrobe-gate? That will be the worst $150,000 the RNC ever spent.
Even MT! Too bad about AR and LA. I wonder about NE.
This is the best EV distro ever: "Most likely Obama EV totals: 375, 378, 376, 379, 380". All exceed Clinton v 1.0.
I hope you are right, Poll Junkie. We will have to compare polls to actual results to see if they are or aren't more reliable than, say, 2004. Perhaps someone already has done this for the primaries? Sorry I can't point to any evidence of increased/decreased poll accuracy this time, but they are certainly being processed more.
AMY GOODMAN: Nate, CNN has this poll of polls that says it has no margin of error. As the sister of a statistician, I ask you, is this possible?
NATE SILVER: Yeah, it’s kind of a grandiose claim that CNN makes there. You know, it’s like, oh, there’s no—it’s the perfect—you know, no margin of error at all. I mean, of course this has a margin for error. And one problem is that even in states where you have, you know, tons and tons of polling data, you know, as many people as you’d want to interview—for example, in New Hampshire this year for the primary, there were literally twelve or thirteen polls with, you know, hundreds of people each that were in the field at the same time. You probably had 10,000 or 20,000 people who were interviewed by these pollsters. It’s like ten percent of the people who actually voted. And yet, the polls there missed Hillary Clinton by eight or ten points, missed badly. The problem is when polling firms make mistakes, they often make them all in the same direction. So the mere fact that you’re compiling polls together doesn’t really help when they kind of make the same mistakes, you know?
[My bold]
MEDIA::: Lowering your expectations:
Analysts Eye Possible Exit Poll Overstatement Of Obama Support
It's an AFP story but only appears in Malaysia at the moment. No writer is credited. Seems to be beating the Bradley Effect dead horse.
darkness and light:
+ The 3.7% McCain winning percentage at 538. Door's closing… :-D
- This quote from the Washington Post:
"McCain's team dismisses the most dire polls -- those showing the race nationally with a double-digit lead for Obama. Advisers believe the contest's margin is in the five-to-seven-point range, about the same deficit, they say, that then-Vice President Al Gore faced at this time eight years ago against then-Gov. George W. Bush. (A Washington Post poll at the same point in the 2000 race showed a tie.)"
[my bold]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102303806.html
They just had to toot their own horn in that final parenthetical line.
Course, they neglect to menton that Al Gore lost. Or are they now admitting that he won?
Some of Obama's numbers look historic, like we haven't seen since LBJ (-- Democrats winning the high plains, for example).
Possible Electoral Goals:
270 Gore's Revenge
371 Surpasses Clinton '92
380 Surpasses Clinton '96
427 Dukakis' Revenge (Surpasses Papa Bush)
Trans-national Democratic Drive-Path: Requires unlikely states such as AZ, NE, GA, IN, plus VA and NC to create a contiguous group of blue states which could be driven through (with the exception of Hawaii).
IMPossible Electoral Goals:
487: Surpasses LBJ (McCain the new Goldwater)
490: Carter's Revenge (surpasses Reagan 1)
521: McGovern's Revenge (Whip Nixon Now!)
526: Mondale's Revenge (surpasses Reagan 2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide_victory
What IS a landslide? A 2:1 ratio in the E-College works for me. That works out to roughly 360 vs 180 for nice round numbers (as in 360 degrees of freedom) although 359 to 179 might be more accurate.
BTW, Reagan's "Landslide" was won with 50.8% of the vote due to a now-forgotten figure named John Anderson. I believe 60 or 61% is about the highest popular vote anyone has got in modern times.
-fwiw-
Man, those recent Ohio polls are all over the map.
Hmmm. See this? Sam Wang on the track record of simple poll aggregation
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