Romney peaked last Friday, and the "slightly favorable trend" is Obama's. Obama's chance of winning is, as of yesterday, 71%, up from 68.1% Tuesday.
By the way, there is a 10.5% chance that Wisconsin's electoral votes will be decisive, making us the third most-likely-to-be-decisive state (after Ohio and Virginia).
And The Washington Post just endorsed Obama:
[E]conomic head winds and an uncompromising opposition explain some of [Obama's] failures — and render that much more impressive the substantial accomplishments of Mr. Obama’s first term....ADDED: There's no way to know what Obama really believes either. It's mentally unbalanced to allow such pedestrian realities to make you sad.
What kind of case has Mr. Romney made for himself?... The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes.
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253 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 253 of 253In a sense, this is good, because we need to find out if foreign entities fed Nakoula money and advice to damage America - much as the Soviets spend money and organizational help to US anti-Vietnam War groups.
C4, I think you've completely jumped the shark. In this country, we do NOT put people in jail because we'd like to believe that someone may have given them money for a lousy movie that no one watched.
And yes, he is a first amendment hero. He was put in jail because the federal government wanted a scapegoat. It had NOTHING to do with parole violations.
Anyone who believes this is how it ought to be should just turn in his citizenship and move to Cuba or North Korea.
Despicable.
You'll be taken care of, if you're over 55. Whew.
You did it again. Why do people try this tactic?
No, SS isn't going to pay my bills.
Romney supporters can be just as much a pain in the ass as Obama supporters. Once they dig into the argument, reality disappears and dogged dedication to the argument triumphs.
Pull your head out of your ass for a moment.
"It's an anecdote of course. I don't expect Benghazi to become the Watergate of our time, but it will be a drag on Obama as he tries to recapture the 2008 fervor in the final days of his campaign"
If we had a Republican in the white house the liberal media and the Dems would already be talking impeachment, plus no doubt some Republicans would be urging the president to resign. Watergate was a third rate burglary and no one died.
The Benghazi coverup has hurt Obama though, I believe.
"The law doesn't exist, of course, but Romney's proposal is understood to be based the Health Care Choice Act of 2005 sponsored by Representative John Shadegg and Senator Jim DeMint, which you can Google."
-- ... I'm not chasing phantoms for you. First you tell me that Romney is proposing something, now you tell me that the proposal you have created to scare people is based on something that it may not be based on, it is merely "understood" to be so. Understood by who? You?
No. You made an assertion; support it.
September eleven. Those unexpected deaths were really funny... What do you call a tower full of New York office workers after the charring?
I was eight blocks away. Lost friends.
You tactics are no different than those of the other side, who insist that I must devote my life forever to the ongoing martyrdom of blacks, gays and women.
Try lowering the temperature on your thermostat a bit and thinking before you type... if you are capable.
yay! we've got one as stupid as Inga on our side now
In Keith Olbermann's defense, he did a countdown for the oil spill.
yay! we've got one as stupid as Inga on our side now
That's the truth!
I've had to delete almost as many Romney ranters as Obama ranters from my Facebook friend list over the last few months.
The Obama ranters have been marginally worse.
"Remarkable Romney is doing so well considering the concerted effort by msm to not cover the failures of Obama's term -- Fast and Furious, Solyndra, ‘We Decline to Comment’ on When Obama Learned of E-Mails, Met With NSC on Benghazi""
The new media helps get the news out to some extent.
Jane was fat;
hit the ground and went "splat".
Now Jane don't have to worry 'bout her weight, n all that.
Those are your statements. I appreciate your effort to attribute them to me.
But, that's called lying. You aren't exactly winning hearts and minds for your candidate with these tactics.
Benghazi is the ultimate Obama fuck you at the American media and voters.
It was done for NO reason except to show off to his pro-Muslim, anti-semitic advisers that he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to it.
That's a might arrogant stance. Why now?
I suspect that the Iranian Bomb is already done by now. The enriched U-235 is ready. It hasn't been tested yet , but the triggers is all they lack. And the Pakistani/North Korea connection will supply that on demand.
I think I have a pretty good idea what Obama believes. This is the only reason I can vote for a pos like Romney. It's like picking arsenic over cyanide. I might make it to the hospital with arsenic poisoning.
What a shame we had the winner take all system in place from the beginning. Maybe with proportional representation of some sort we woulnd't have been as susceptible as we are to managed democracy and the exercise of total power without the appearance of it.
It's a shame about the dinosarus, too.
Patrick said...
Funny, didn't realize Silver had even acknowledged the momentum.
10/25/12 12:09 PM
It's just in the headline, but here ya go:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/oct-6-romney-maintains-poll-momentum/
Roger J. said...
when the hammer of god discovers you have been posting and I have been responding
Droll, sir. Very droll.
But I think you may be spared.
I do believe said hammer appreciates a gentleman.
Yashu--when, regretably it seems, many Americans get their news from Comedy Central, the Tonite show and other incisive and hard hitting news shows, we are probably fucked. There's a reason why Obama keeps showing up on these shows.
Yeah, agreed. And like Matthew, I tend to be pessimistic. But-- there are now cracks in the Obama media forcefield. Generally speaking, news and entertainment media both will always be much harder on the Republican than the Democrat, and of course Romney much more than Obama. But: they are actually (sometimes) hitting Obama too now! And more than just superficial scratches.
I think that first debate definitively popped the media bubble surrounding Obama. Of course they'll still protect and spin for Obama, against Romney (cf. WP endorsement). But we just need enough media cracks-- enough pinpricks-- to snap low-info people out of their Obamatrance. They may not vote for Romney-- but at least they're no longer hypnotized by Obama.
And that allows them to notice and be affected by things (e.g. Obama's offputting demeanor, petty campaign attacks, dishonesty, etc.) that they would have been blind to before.
And here's the thing about running a 'celebrity' (entertainment media) campaign. In 2008, for all the celebrity adulation for Obama, Obama transcended celebrity: that's what gave him that appearance of 'messianic' power.
Americans are addicted to celebrity. But they (we) don't worship celebrities-- there's fandom and appreciation, yes, but Americans also tend to view celebrities with a mixture of voyeuristic amusement, contempt, and Schadenfreude.
Obama has reduced himself, the POTUS, to a mere celebrity. On the TV screen, in those settings, he's qualitatively equivalent to whatever B-list celebrity appears before or after him (before or after the commercial break), to sell their product (i.e. themselves). And IMO that means he's more likely to be judged as celebrities are judged: harshly.
Edutcher--thank you, sir. I always try to be droll--at my age its the only thing left :)
The world changed on August 8, 1945.
And 67 years later it is changing again with an Iranian Terrorist Bomb left in Mitt and Bibi's lap while the Dems push all of the buttons they have set up for the dollar's de-valuation and the the Military budget's sequester.
Yashu--well said. I think you hit the nail on the head. Mr Obama confuses celebrity with competence. Dont know that will necessarily swing the election, but one can only hope.
Appreciate your posts BTW--they are always well done.
I Callahan said...
In a sense, this is good, because we need to find out if foreign entities fed Nakoula money and advice to damage America - much as the Soviets spend money and organizational help to US anti-Vietnam War groups.
C4, I think you've completely jumped the shark. In this country, we do NOT put people in jail because we'd like to believe that someone may have given them money for a lousy movie that no one watched.
And yes, he is a first amendment hero. He was put in jail because the federal government wanted a scapegoat. It had NOTHING to do with parole violations.
================
Sorry, your scumbag hero IS in jail on parole violation charges. Not for his heroic championing of the Sacred 1st by encouraging Muslims to kill Americans.
He explicitly and publicly violated his probation. And his lot is really no different than a DWI scumbag who killed or mangled 6 victims driving drunk getting caught on a major televised baseball game catching a homer while juggling a beer. Violating his "no alcohol" probation.
And even in Benghazi, we are learning the attack organizers exploited the Prophet video by instructing all their fighters that killing Americans is even more needed, because riots were breaking out everywhere over their defamation of the Prophet.
(And the Marines killed Japs with abandon in Okinawa. Japs that had absolutely nothing to do with the Rape of Nanking and Bataan Death March newsreels and flicks the Japanese stupidly allowed to be promulgated. )
We were also right to have the FBI investigate Front Groups whose 1st Amendment Hero stooges were on the Soviet payroll. Stooges and stalinist enforcers and community organizers that heroically spewed what propaganda the Soviets wanted fed to the Americans to help subvert them.
B+
there were 11 other attacks that day that put Americans overseas in fear of their safety that were solely tied to the blasphemy video.,
If you believe that bullshit, I have a bridge to sell you. However, I doubt you believe it, but it's the only defense your Dear Leader has, so you carry the water for him.
It could be that a lot of us are going to be feeling like Fisher in Fisher v. University of Texas.
It's interesting how liberals gobble up any shit you put before them, as long as you sprinkle on the patina of science-y sounding jargon.
Nate Silver: A mathematically illiterate person's idea of a statistician.
Somewhere on his blog there's a graph that shows the disproportionate influence he attributes to some in-house-generated economic index. Right now, that index dominates the influence of polls; as the election approaches, the polls will dominate.
And the polls that are more heavily weighted are the older polls. For stability, understand.
You can only imagine what his economic index looks like, since it heavily favors re-election when U6 unemployment is at 14%, gas is $3.50 per gallon, and GDP growth hasn't kept pace with population growth.
Silver's model is doing exactly what it was designed to do from the beginning: Heavily favor Obama, until just before the election. Then gradually the probability of Obama's re-election will start to slide. Right now, he's at 70%. A week before the election, it will tick down to 68% (actually, 68.037%). Here's my prediction of Silver's predictions:
30 Oct: 70%
31 Oct: 67.037%
1 Nov: 66.412%
2 Nov: 66.993%
3 Nov: 63.583%
4 Nov: 55.385%
5 Nov: 49.996%
6 Nov: 49.857%
And then he'll be hailed as a genius again next cycle.
yashu wrote: But we just need enough media cracks-- enough pinpricks-- to snap low-info people out of their Obamatrance. They may not vote for Romney-- but at least they're no longer hypnotized by Obama.
M'SMerized! :)
"No. You made an assertion; support it."
I did. I cited to Mitt's website, and to the Republican legislation that corresponds to his proposal. Not sure what else you're looking for. It's not my job to teach you health policy. I am just making descriptive claims; none of this stuff is controversial.
"The enriched U-235 is ready. It hasn't been tested yet , but the triggers is all they lack."
Once you've got the U235, you've got the bomb. The "triggers" are what make a plutonium bomb difficult. Plutonium is easy to make in a reactor, very difficult to turn into a bomb. The Trinity test was primarily to verify that the implosion system for the plutonium would work. The design of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (a uranium bomb) wasn't tested (at least not for real) because: 1) the U235 was very hard to get, and 2) they were pretty sure that design would work. Give me the enriched uranium and I'll give you a bomb.
This is a sad discussion because the Althouse Blog is a solid right wing blog, so most folks here think Obama is a buffoon and that Romney is a principled leader.
That is fine; nobody expects Althouse or Instapundit to be anything but conservative claiming to be moderate.
However, Nate Silver has been consistent with his analysis. When Romney was sweeping up and rising in the polls Silver said his opinion was that Romney surge was even greater than the polls showed.
On a professor's blog, you should be embarrassed to claim that anyone who doesn't share your "moderate" opinions that Obama is a buffoon is in a grand conspiracy against the facts.
Someone will win. If Obama wins, people will have more control if their insurance lapses. If Romney wins, the SCOTUS justices he appoints will consolidate the power of corporations and perhaps declare the fetus is a citizen from conception, entitled to equal protection.
No credible economist believes that Romney will create 12 million high paying jobs, nor does anyone think anything either man can do will halt or reverse the decline of wages and the downward spiral caused by the growing income disparity. We are tied for 33rd place with Brazil. We will fall lower in our lifetimes.
We are amusing ourselves to death while the fires blaze. Nero played the fiddle; we demonize each other and act as if calling Obama a buffoon covers the fact that nothing Romney can do could create 12 million high paying jobs.
Your Honor, Romney is innocent of all the things he said that are not true, because Obama lied.Reverse the plea, and it still is not a good argument.
Just so you all know, in case you don't, making an atomic bomb from enriched uranium is dirt simple. In fact it is so simple that the US did not even test one of their bombs they dropped in WW2.
If Iran has enough enriched uranium, they have a bomb. It's that simple.
"Seems" he says. Have to wait and see, sez I.
We don't know what Romney really believes? What does Obama believe, other than he's the smartest guy in the world?
And if Obama's so likeable, why is he saying bad things about me? Makes him seem much less likeable to me.
No credible economist believes that Romney will create 12 million high paying jobs...
And yet nearly 700 of them have signed on to the "Economists for Romney" statement.
Nate Silver is the real deal, but there are a few defensible choices his model has that, if he is wrong, then his model would be 70-30 Romney. If break out of D-R-I is more like 2004 than 2008, the race goes to Romney.
The second is if he takes out the 2000 race (the final pre-election poll in which W. was up by 2.7 but lost popular vote by .5), from all Presidential races since 1972, then Romney is highly likely to win. If he's wrong on both, then Romney will almost certainly surpass 300 electoral votes, and win states Repubs haven't won since 1988.
Presidential Polls tend to slightly favor Dems and incumbents (which include
Incumbent party, so Gore would be comaidered an inumbent in 00 and McCain in 08). compared to the actual final results. These slight flaws in the poll offset each other when Republican is incumbent because the incumbency bias cancels out the Dem bias. So
1972, 1976, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2004, and 2008 final polls match the results. But 1980 and 1996 do not. The Dem bias and incumbent bias produced final polls that noticeably overestimated the Dem incumbent support.
But in 2000, this didn't happen. However, the final poll was released before the Nov surprise released the Saturday before the election about W's DUI in 1976. So there is a decent reason to view 2000 as an outlier, but Nate Silver doesn't and he doesn't explain why. So Silver could be right, but there are 2 god reasons to think he may be wrong.
M'SMerized! :)
Heh! Great neologism, so good it's worth stealing.
"No credible economist believes that Romney will create 12 million high paying jobs...."
A good friend of mine uses this argument style all the time. You could call it the appeal to non-authority, or the appeal to authority without citing authority method.
Clearly if an economist DID believe Romney could create so many jobs said economist would not be credible, ergo, no credible economist can ever believe it. What an amazingly convincing argument- at last I see the light.
This is surveying, not physics. Its a bad analogy.
Why is Belmont Club showing a chart from a WP-ABC poll which shows Mitt breaking away?
"What kind of case has Mr. Romney made for himself?... The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes."
ADDED: There's no way to know what Obama really believes either. It's mentally unbalanced to allow such pedestrian realities to make you sad.
Althouse has achieved her biggest boner yet -- an endorsement of candidates who shouldn't bother having to say anything at all! Because if we can't judge their intentions by the inconsistency of their words, then what's the point!?
Such brilliance is only to be found on this incredible blog. It obviously has yet to catch on.
And the polls that are more heavily weighted are the older polls.
If that's the case, it's probably due to early voting, you douchebag.
Polls that oversample Democrats is all that Obama has to overcome the October Surprise brought on by the regimes lies about the Benghazi attack.
The over-samples will be done after the weekend with but a week to go. After all is said, the pollsters have be accurate at least once every two years. Silver's credibility is on the line next week as well.
Below is what Commentary had to say about the polls and Nate Silver, liberal denial.
"Feeding this denial is the widespread oversampling of Democrats in polls that still show the president leading the race. The assumption that the turnout of the president’s supporters will match or exceed those that lifted him to a historic victory in 2008 seems to be based more on a leap of liberal faith than evidence, but it is statistical tricks like that that are keeping Obama’s head above water in the polls. Partisans always tend to believe polls that tell them what they want to hear, but systems that weigh polls in an arbitrary manner such as Silver’s forecast seem to be similarly positioned to keep Obama ahead for as long as possible."
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/10/25/liberal-denial-will-only-get-worse/#more-809205
If that's the case, it's probably due to early voting, you douchebag.
I'm pretty sure that anyone's probability of being sampled is unrelated to whether he or she has already voted. Early voting is no reason to give early polls heavy weighting.
Shouting Thomas is right about bipartisanship being a bad thing. Everybody understands that when Intel and Microsoft or Google get together and agree to cooperate, it is likely a conspiracy against the public and the free market. The justice dept. looks into it. However, when the Democrats and Republicans do the same thing it is heralded as a great new era of good feeling. BS, it's still a conspiracy against the public. I don't trust them when they agree.
It cool when you make a douchebag comment and call someone else a douchebag in it.
It's like smashing beer cans on your forehead to pick up chicks.
Nate Silver and the NY Times are trying to boost the morale of Democrats. So they say Romney's momentum is a myth. What they are keeping from the Democrats are the stark realities of the data.
Romney's momentum is not a myth. They're just trying to keep the bots from believing the obvious.
Fact #1 Gallup has had Romney at 50% or above for over a week.
Fact #2 Rasmussen has Romney at 50%
Fact #3 ABC/WashPO has Romney at 50%
Fact #4 Of the 10 most recent polls at RCP Obama is at or below 48% in 9 of them.
Fact #5 No incumbent has won reelection when polling under 50%.
Conclusion.................Romney's momentum is only a myth to those who willingly suspend disbelief.
Romney may not win, but in my view he's now the slight favorite.
Too bad for you that you neglect that while Benghazi was attacked, there were 11 other attacks that day that put Americans overseas in fear of their safety that were solely tied to the blasphemy video.,
There is also evidence that some of the attackers at Benghazi were stoking their fighters up prior to the planned attack on news of attacks underway in Cairo and Sana Lebanon and Tripoli due to America blasphemed the Prophet. In the same way we showed Bataan Death March tapes the Japs stupidly let us get, as ammunition to rile up the Marines before attacking Okinawa. It had nothing to do with the planned, organized Okinawa attack, but it was a great psychological tool to get Marines more willing to kill Japs.
And too bad for you your 1st Amendment Hero IS in jail for blatant violation of the specific terms of his probation aimed at stopping him from the same behavior that got him convicted of major felonies in the past.
In a sense, this is good, because we need to find out if foreign entities fed Nakoula money and advice to damage America - much as the Soviets spend money and organizational help to US anti-Vietnam War groups. And if Nakoula cooperates, maybe he can help avoid having to go back and serve his full term for indentity theft and bank fraud.
(The scumbag hero of Chistopher in MA also has a few other priors, including jail time for trying to set up a meth lab)
In other words, too bad for Nakoula. Sure, Hillary wants to throw his ass in jail for no reason, but, hell, he violated his parole! And other people got attacked anyway! And squirrel! And JOOOOOS!
I didn't expect anything more from you, C4. I know garbage is an Obama cum guzzler; it's a laugh watching you burn the first amendment because it doesn't comport with your weltanchaung.
Isn't it time for you to order a new Magda Goebbels love doll, gruppenfuhrer?
Early voting is no reason to give early polls heavy weighting.
What are you talking about? If earlier polls favored one candidate moreso than later polls do, then the record number of early votes tilt the outcome more heavily in favor of that candidate.
Here is the first sentence from the third paragraph of the press release for the Foster McCollum White Baydoun poll of Michigan voters.
Thirty five thousand (35,000) calls were placed, and 1,122 respondents fully participated in the survey.
Just think about that for a minute. They called 35 thousand people and 97 percent of them hung up on the pollster. And from things I've read in other places, that's actually pretty typical.
To make any sort of inference at all from the 3 percent who did talk to the pollsters, you have to make the heroic assumption that those 3 percent are representative of the other 97 percent. There is absolutely no reason to believe this.
The polls are bullshit.
Is there an ideological self-selection bias in polling?
I mean, most libertarian types like myself like being left alone. Ergo, we are most likely to ignore pollsters.
I have noticed though, that the more liberal of my friends are certainly the more politically active on Facebook and in the community. Are they more likely to engage pollsters?
I have no idea. Maybe that's why a lot more polls lean to the D+x samples. Just throwing that out there.
The numbers across the board say that Romney's post-Denver bump is gone, & the tide is turning slightly in Obama's favor for the home stretch. Where Romney is making gains, they're inadequate to carry all the states he needs to win the electoral college. Silver isn't a pollster, he's an aggregator of pollsters - if he's wrong then ALL the polls are wrong ... a very dubious thesis.
"There's no way to know what Obama really believes either."
Only one candidate has changed positions on nearly every single plank of their platform, & it isn't Obama. Romney changed positions on Obamacare four times in one day a few weeks back. He agreed with Obama's foreign policies again & again in the third debate where he'd bashed Obama on them throughout the primaries. Locking in the Bush Tax Cuts is about the only thing he hasn't flip-flopped on (yet).
If earlier polls favored one candidate moreso than later polls do, then the record number of early votes tilt the outcome more heavily in favor of that candidate.
What are you talking about? Why would you suppose that early voters are a representative sample of the full electorate instead of hard-core supporters of their candidate?
But let's suppose you're right. In that case, your argument is that there are significant numbers of people who voted early for Obama who now tell pollsters that they plan to vote for Romney.
Intriguing argument.
Silver isn't a pollster, he's an aggregator of pollsters - if he's wrong then ALL the polls are wrong....
If all the polls put Obama ahead, there'd be no need to aggregate them. Since they differ, the aggregate result depends on the method of aggregation.
Silver constructs a weighted average of poll results. The choices that he makes include the weight to attach to each poll, the polls to be included, and the manner in which new poll results are used to update his aggregate.
Silver has plenty of room for error that has nothing to do with the accuracy of the individual polls.
And as far as I can tell both democrats and republicans believe in God, Apple Pie, Freedom Guns and Capitalism.
Or at least both sides say so. So let's not debate God, Freedom, Guns and Capitalism.
Obama hasn't taken anyone's weapons. Not one. And he doesn't secretly pray to Mecca. His economic advisers are all from Wall Street Goldman Sachs not Soviet Russia.
Hating on Nate Silver has to be one of most efficient ways to announce, "I am incapable of separating emotion from rational thought."
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