Electoral Vote Contest

Spreadsheet thus far

I did the lettering myself (to save S/I $$)

My revised electoral score. Fixed an error or two and also moved PA back to Obama. Michigan might still go Romney. I still think OH will. I think FL will hold.

So…

Obama loses 225 to 313

325-213 win for Romney

p.s. close to Aaron’s numbers

my previous prediction stands. that other map was for argumentation purposes only.

Here is an interesting article that shows how easy it is for the polls to get the results they want just by skewing the polling sample to the party of their choice.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/31/final-cbsnytq-polls-in-oh-fl-va-s…

Here is another one:

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/31/ppp-obama-leads-by-5-in-ohio-5045/

This one is interesting also, though I don’t get what the graphs are supposed to mean.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-polling-quandary-buckey…

Romney 290

Obama 248

Sandy 0

Romney 279

Obama 259

I can only hope.

I hope I’m wrong but I don’t see Romney getting over the top.

Obama - 271

Romney - 267

Jared

Jared, I tend to agree with you. Romney’s momentum has definitely leveled off.

Romney’s only hope is if the polls are consistently oversampling Democrats. Many polls are based on 2008 voter models and some pundits think Democratic turnout will be lower than 2008.

Just heard an interesting analysis of the Ohio race.

Per this pundit, in 2008, 47% of Ohio voted for McCain. He reasons like this:

• Who are that 47% going to vote for this time?
• How likely is it that Romney will gain 3% among the rest?

To him the answer is obvious. He’s convinced Romney will actually win more than 52% in OH.

Of course, that raises the question why are so many polls not showing that? He says certain demographics are being undersampled. Rasmussen does have Romney up by 2 in OH.

Supposedly there is also a history of pollsters getting OH wrong. I don’t know if that’s the case or not (or in what direction they are usually wrong).

Romney 270

Obama 268

Obama wins Ohio and Colorado, Romney pulls out a win in Wisconsin and Florida.

Ok, Aaron. We’re close enough to election day now, I think you should just call it and announce a winner.

My final guess

295 - Romney

243 - Obama

Romney sweeps the swing states + WI, with the exception of Nevada.

I think the national polling in Romney’s favor + the state polling being tilted toward more of a 2008 voter turnout / voter party split + the attitudes of the different campaigns seem to indicate that Obama’s on the way out. I may easily be wrong, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see change.

Romney -275

Obama - 263

Romney wins FL, NC, VA, CO and OH

Obama holds on to NV, IA, WI, PA, NH

Almost giving Romney Iowa (which would make the split 281-257), but for now, I’ll leave it like it is.

Thanks all for your participation. Others … please submit your prediction by end of day Friday 11/2

The prize patrol van may visit your home with 2 fantastic books! (or it could be the UPS truck delivering them in an Amazon box!)

Romney 289

Obama 249

Romney 272

Obama 266

But frankly, I may be a little overly optimistic. I also believe that it is highly likely that Romney could win the popular vote, while Obama wins the electoral vote.

The winner will be the campaign and party that does the better job of actually getting its self-described “supporters” to the polls.

I also think that Romney spoke the truth when he inarticulately tried to say that 47% of the population would not vote for him under any circumstances.

Romney 291, Obama 247

http://youtu.be/ltCIEbLMaQg

Meat! meat! meat!

REPUBLICANS HAVE WON EVERY NOVEMBER 6TH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SINCE 1860

Starting in 1792, states had a range of dates on which to conduct presidential elections, but in 1845 Congress standardized the date so it would always be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Since then presidential elections have been held on dates ranging from November 2nd to November 8th with each date coming up about six times in a fairly regular pattern. The date November 6th has always been a good one for Republicans:
1860 - Abraham Lincoln over Stephen Douglas
1888 - Benjamin Harrison over incumbent Grover Cleveland
1900 - William McKinley over William Jennings Bryan
1928 - Herbert Hoover over Al Smith
1956 - Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson
1984 - Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale

Republicans Have Won Every November 6th Presidential Election Since 1860

Romney 285 (Including FL, NC, VA, CO, IA, NH and OH)

Obama 253

This is identical to Jim’s prediction.

I’m Rick Franklin and I approved this message.

Deadline is midnight! Thanks

Here’s the reason I’m on the fence about the outcome of this election.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/02/claims-increasing-switched-v…

I just don’t trust the left.

Romney 309 (w/FL, NC, VA, PA, NH, OH, WI, CO

Obama 229

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Te…

at least in ohio, the voting machine problems could be the result of the republican secretary of state applying last-minute uncertified updates http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2012/4768

fortunately, so far, all the people who say the machine wasn’t correctly accepting their selection have been able to correct the situation before finalizing their vote.

[Michelle Shuman] Here’s the reason I’m on the fence about the outcome of this election.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/02/claims-increasing-switched-v…

I just don’t trust the left.

Seems like every year there are (and I am being generous with my term here) “voting irregularities”.

• Consider: Franken - Coleman (US Senate MN in 2008)
• Consider the 1960 Presidential election and Illinois and Texas

[Jack] Naw, but it’s my best guess: Obama 294 over Romney 244. Prize to JohnBrian if I win (my shelves are already overloaded).

I hope either you or I win!

[Jim]

Seems like every year there are (and I am being generous with my term here) “voting irregularities”.

• Consider: Franken - Coleman (US Senate MN in 2008)
• Consider the 1960 Presidential election and Illinois and Texas

Don’t forget the Gregoire - Rossi race for governor in Washington, 2004.

If this holds … Obama wins

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/swing-state-tracker?ref=politics

The qualifier at the bottom of the NYT poll article says:

Latest polls” only includes polls that meet the methodological standards of The Times’s News Surveys department.

Hmmm…left wing NYT and their “news survey department” doing some last minute polling in a close race. Hmmm….nah, they wouldn’t have favorable samplings for Obama…not the NYT.

Final on predictions (Excel spreadsheet)

If anything looks out of line PM me

[Jim]

If this holds … Obama wins

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/swing-state-tracker?ref=politics

http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/31/on-polling-models-skewed-unskewed/

See also:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332386/parsing-polls-michael-g-f…

And notice what this article says we can learn from early voting:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83248.html

But of course you can find just as many articles saying the opposite. This really is an amazing election in that the experts really are divided on what will happen.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702037076045780909622672008…

It’s generally thought that the president burned any remaining bridge to [the evangelicals] with the gay-marriage decision that Joe Biden made for him. But it’s more complicated than one issue.

Four years ago, evangelicals mainly supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. When John McCain became the nominee, he and the evangelical community never connected, and many evangelicals stayed home. This time they are in motion.

The president of Ohio Christian University, Mark A. Smith, says, “The intensity of voters in the faith community is as high as I’ve seen it in the last 12 years.” The driver of that intensity is religious liberty. “We took a direct hit with the Affordable Care Act,” he says. Evangelicals watched the Obama administration’s big public fight with Catholic hospitals and charities. What they concluded is that the health-care law was a direct threat to their own private outreach programs.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Obama-Cleveland-80k-…

re Obama’s “enthusiasm gap”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/paths-to-the-…

Obama might as well call Romney this morning and concede. Why? The Redskins lost.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

I’m hoping this is right:

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2012/11/05/Why-the-Polls-are-Wrong-P…

Romney: 273

Obama: 265

I’m giving PA, NH, MI to Obama; VA, FL, WI to Mitt.

My home state, OH, unfortunately goes to the incumbant.

But I still get to the outcome I want. B^|

EDIT: My map.

Romney wins 321-217 in the electoral college and 52%-48% in the nationwide popular vote. I used realclearpolitics.com to create the map.

With one exception (MN), my picks are based on states where Rasmussen polling has Romney tied or ahead. In most cases Rasmussen’s poll is higher for Romney than the other polls.

Here’s the additional rationale for my prediction:

Objective Rationale

1. Rasmussen and Gallup are the two polls that have large sample sizes and, hence, a smaller margin of error. I’d use Gallup, too, but didn’t have access to their state polls.
2. Nearly all of the other polls are weighted by party based on turnout percentages for 2008 (or something close to that). I don’t think that’s reasonable. Almost uniformly, the polling shows that Republicans are much more energized and will likely to turn out in higher percentages, and Democrats are less energized and will turn out in lower percentages.
3. Compared to 2008, the percentage of registered voters who identify as Republicans has increased relative to those who identify as Democrats
4. Across the board, the polling shows that independents, who strongly favored Obama in 2008, are breaking very decidedly for Romney this time.
5. Polling shows that Democrats are not building nearly the same “head start” in early voting as last time.
6. On MN, I’m going out on a limb a bit, since Romney’s behind in the polls. George Will convinced me of that one. His rationale: There is a marriage amendment on the ballot which will bring out a higher than usual percentage of the evangelical vote. That, coupled with the overall higher turnout for Republicans in general may surprise everyone. Since my prediction is predicated on an overall big day for Republicans anyway, Will’s argument seemed a bit more credible than fanciful. Probably not coincidentally, George Will’s prediction of the electoral college totals exactly match mine, once I add MN in (similar rationale?).

Great analysis Phil. I know my guess is high, but your statement about voter turnout projections and polls as well as the projections of independents is why I think that it could be a very decisive Romney victory. The one thing that concerns me most is that the vote margins are wide enough to overcome the margin of cheating. My sister in law recently moved from Iowa to MN and is registered to vote in MN now. We got a knock on the door yesterday from an Obama supporter asking if she was going to vote. My wife told them she no longer lived here and then realized that they could use that information to have someone else go and vote in her name since she is still on the voter roles in Iowa and no ID is required. We are in a small town where people knew her, so it is not likely to happen here, but in a bigger city I doubt anyone would ever find out. The sad part is that if someone voted in her name and later the crime was discovered, and she could not prove it was not her who did it, she would be the one to go to jail for voter fraud, not the criminal who actually stole her vote. Voter ID actually protects not just votes, but voters from false accusations.

If Obama wins …. only 4 in S/I EV contest predicted it

I also hope the margin of victory is larger than a “margin of cheating” in most people’s minds. Both sides are primed to claim the election was stolen.

We really need serious voting process reform… but not centralizing. I do think some legislation from Congress normalizing voter identity verification across the country would be a good thing—if it’s done right.

The advantage of the current mess is that it’s much harder to stack the deck than a centralized system would be. Still, it’s not as hard as I wish. Lots and lots of small cheating can make a difference if it accumulates in a few swing states.

This morning I heard an anecdote from someone whose sister-in-law had moved to a different state, but was still registered in her former state. Canvassers came to the door to ask if she had voted yet, This sort of situation is a major opportunity for voter fraud, as are young people who go to college out of state.

This evening I heard about this story out of Las Vegas. I’m not surprised that a union was assisting in voter fraud.