Obama winning, statistical model proves

Censky 10/17 ( Annalyn, CNN Money author, Misery Index predicts Obama will win the
election, http://economy.money.cnn.com/2012/10/17/misery-index-obama-will-win-theelection/?iid=HP_LN&hpt=hp_t2)

Are Americans feeling more miserable than they were four years ago? According to the socalled "misery index," they're not -- a fact that boosts President Obama's chances of winning
re-election.
The misery index combines the unemployment rate and the annual inflation rate and has
accurately predicted the outcome of nine of the last 12 presidential elections, according to
economists at Deutsche Bank.
When it rises, it's considered a sign of a weaker economy and a bad omen for the incumbent
president and his political party. When it falls, the outcome has been the opposite, with the
incumbent or his party winning re-election.
(In the three cases when the index did not accurately predict the election, it was essentially
flat, changing less than one percentage point over a four year period.)
Economist Arthur Okun invented the misery index in the early 1970s, and the indicator
became famous when Jimmy Carter used it to criticize incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976
election.Inflation was soaring during that time, and unemployment rose along with it.
Unfortunately for Carter, that trend continued throughout his own presidency, and four years
later, challenger Ronald Reagan used the misery index to defeat him in the 1980 election.
"When he was a candidate in 1976, President Carter invented a thing he called the misery
index," Reagan said in a debate a week before the election. "He added the rate of
unemployment and the rate of inflation, and it came, at that time, to 12.5% under President
Ford. He said that no man with that size misery index has a right to seek reelection to the
Presidency. Today, by his own decision, the misery index is in excess of 20%, and I think this
must suggest something."
Where does the misery index stand now? As of the third quarter, it was 9.8%, down from
11.3% four years ago.
"Our conclusion is that if voters choose their candidate based on this metric alone, the
election will narrowly tilt in favor of the current President," said Carl Riccadonna, a Deutsche
Bank economist who recently issued a report on the topic.

Riccadonna also analyzed where the misery index stands in the swing states. The
battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin have all shown improvement
according to the misery index, suggesting Obama will win these states.
But four states -- Colorado, Missouri, Nevada and Pennsylvania -- are worse-off than they
were four years ago. Florida is a toss-up.

New stats skewed, Obama still winning

Silver 10/19 (Nate, Oct. 18: Obama Gains in Forecast on Resiliency in
Swing State Polls,
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/oct-18-obamagains-in-forecast-on-resiliency-in-swing-state-polls/)
One of the risks in focusing too much on the results of any one poll, like the Gallup national
tracking poll, is that you may lose sight of the bigger picture.
On Thursday, that story was one of President Obama continuing to hold leads in most polls
of critical states. Of the 13 polls of swing states released on Thursday, Mr. Obama held leads
in 11 of them.

In contrast to most days since the first presidential debate in Denver, the state polls did not
necessarily show a decline for Mr. Obama. As compared with the previous edition of the
same survey, instead, he gained ground in five of the polls, and lost ground in four others.
(Two of the polls showed an exactly unchanged margin, while two were published for the first
time.) Some of the polls, like the SurveyUSA polls of Ohio and Nevada, show a slight uptick
for Mr. Obama since the Denver debate; others, like the polls from NBC News, The Wall
Street Journal and Marist College of Wisconsin and Iowa, show Mr. Obamas standing
holding even relative to his numbers before the debate.
The two battleground surveys in which Mr. Obama trailed on Thursday are worth discussing.
A Susquehanna poll of Pennsylvania (commissioned by the Republican State Committee of
Pennsylvania) showed Mitt Romney four points ahead there the first poll of any kind
showing Mr. Romney with a lead in Pennsylvania since another Susquehanna poll in
February.
The catch is that Susquehanna has long shown much better results for Mr. Romney in
Pennsylvania than other polls of the state. The five-point swing toward Mr. Romney in the
poll is not inconsistent with what the other polls show, but Mr. Romney started from a higher

baseline in the Susquehanna poll, having been down just one point in a poll they conducted
in late September.
Mr. Obama continues to hold a lead of about four points in the FiveThirtyEight average of
Pennsylvania, which is where other polls show the race there. But it has re-emerged as a
potentially important state in the electoral math, having now surpassed Florida on our list
of tipping point states. What makes Pennsylvania a little different is that it is a relatively rare
opportunity for Mr. Romney to play offense in the Electoral College, whereas Florida is more
superfluous for Mr. Obama given that he has myriad other paths to get to 270 electoral votes.
The other swing state poll showing Mr. Romney ahead was in North Carolina, where a
Rasmussen Reports poll gave him a six-point lead.
Mr. Romney has led in six consecutive polls of North Carolina, and the forecast model now
gives him an 85 percent chance of winning it. We have been arguing for several months that
the attention paid by the campaigns to North Carolina was misplaced, and that seems to be
more emphatically clear now: The 15 percent of the time that Mr. Obama wins it in the model
are mostly those cases where hell have had a strong enough night nationally to easily clear
270 electoral votes elsewhere.
Still, the volume of strong polls for Mr. Obama in other swing states carried the day. In
particular, although the Marist poll is a modest outlier in Iowa, Mr. Obama seems to lead in
the consensus of polls in both Nevada and Iowa by a wider margin than he does nationally.
Winning in either of those states along with Wisconsin and Ohio, where the same is true
would suffice to give him 270 electoral votes barring a surprise elsewhere, as in
Pennsylvania.
Mr. Obama may be benefiting from early voting in Iowa, where both polls andstatistics on
ballot requests suggest that he is well ahead among those who have voted so far.
In Nevada, Democrats made a late surge in voter registration totals. They have about a
70,000 voter lead in registration totals among active registered voters, or 120,000 voters
considering inactive voters as well.
There is also some suggestion in the data that the polls with the most recent field dates are
slightly stronger for Mr. Obama than those that were conducted earlier in the week. An
EPIC/MRA poll of Michigan, for instance, conducted entirely on Wednesday, showed him

with a six-point lead there up from three points in a survey the same firm had conducted
earlier in October.
As of Thursday, there were not yet clear signs of a shift toward Mr. Obama in national polls
and certainly not in the Gallup national tracking poll, which has had Mr. Romney continuing
to make gains and put him ahead by seven points among likely voters on Thursday.
Mr. Obama did draw into a tie, however, in Public Policy Pollings most recent national poll,
improving from a four-point deficit in a poll they conducted last weekend.
Online polls conducted by Google Consumer Surveys on Wednesday and Thursday, after this
weeks presidential debate, also showed Mr. Obama with nominal leads of 2.2 and 0.6 points,
reversing a modest advantage they had given to Mr. Romney before this Tuesdays
presidential debate.
Still, if the national polls tell a more equivocal tale than the Gallup poll alone would imply,
its really in the state polls where Mr. Obamas strength lies as has largely been the case all
year.
Mr. Obamas chances of winning the Electoral College improved to 70.4 percent on Thursday
from 65.7 percent on Wednesday, according to the forecast.

Your polls are the popular vote, but Obama wins the Electoral College
Witt 10/19 (Ryan, graduate of Washington University Law School in St.
Louis and has extensive experience teaching government and politics,
If the polls are right, Romney will win the popular vote and lose the
election, http://www.examiner.com/article/if-the-polls-are-rightromney-will-win-the-popular-vote-and-lose-the-election)
If the current polls of the presidential race are accurate, Mitt Romney could become the Al
Gore of 2012. As the entire nation discovered in the 2000 presidential race, the Electoral
College is the vote that counts in determining the presidential winner, not the popular vote.
Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but President George W. Bush won the Electoral College
vote count. In similar fashion, Mitt Romney appears destined to win the popular vote
according to the national polls, but also seems destined to lose the Electoral College vote
count according to the state polls.

If the election were held today and the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of national
polls held true Romney would win the popular vote by about one percentage point. Romney
currently garners 47.7% support in the RCP average of seven national polls.Gallup has
Romney up by seven points (52%-45%), and Rasmussen Reports has Romney up by two
points (49%-47%). IBD/TIPP's tracking poll has the race tied at 46%. There has been
some criticism of Gallups numbers, and it is unlikely that Romney is winning by that big of
margin nationally. Still, the polling averages tend to be very accurate, and the average has
Romney up at this point in the race.
Simply looking at those numbers one might think that Romney would be ahead in the states.
However, the state polls show quite a different picture.
Eleven state polls were released yesterday, and Obama won ten of those polls. Even
excluding the polls of Obamas safe states (Washington, Minnesota, and Connecticut),
Obama still won seven out of eight polls. Rasmussen Reports and Survey USA both had
Obama winning the key swing state of Ohio. NBC/WSJ/Marist has Obama winning Iowa by
eight points (51%-43%) and winning Wisconsin by six points (51%-45%). Public Policy
Polling shows Obama up by three points in Colorado (50%-47%) and two polls
show Obama up by at least three points in Michigan. The one state pollsters had Romney
winning yesterday is North Carolina, which Obama can easily afford to lose. Romney needs
to win at least Ohio.
This national versus state polls trend has been ongoing for weeks now since Romney surged
after the first presidential debate. The national polls have consistently shown, on average,
But then the state polls released on the very same day show what are apparently
contradictory results. A survey of the ten key swing states has consistently shown
Romney losing seven or eight of those states, which would make it impossible for Romney to
get the 270 electoral votes he needs.
Many conservatives have contended that the state polls must be wrong, and that Romney
must be doing better in the swing states than the polls suggests. Liberals have argued that
the national polls must be off. However, at this point it may be time to consider the possibility
that both sets of poll are right.
As much as pollsters are criticized, when multiple pollsters are averaged over time they tend
to be very accurate. In 2008, the RCP average of polls correctly predicted the winner in
49 out of the 50 states. The one state the RCP average was only off by one percentage
point off in the one state it was wrong, North Carolina. Nationally, the RCP average had
Obama up by 7.6 points in 2008, and Obama actually won by 7.3 points. Based on their
track record from 2008, the average of polls is more likely to be right than wrong both
nationally and in the states.

So how is it possible that Romney could be up nationally and yet losing the Electoral
College?
The simplest explanation is that Romney is winning by a bigger margin than Obama in the
states where Romney does prevail. Almost all the states are winner-take-all, so if Obama
wins Ohio by only one point in 2012 he will still get all of Ohios 18 electoral votes. The
margin of victory within each state does not matter in determining the Electoral College vote,
but it does matter in determining the popular vote. If Romney wins his states, on average, by
a bigger margin than Obama than Romney could very well win the popular vote while losing
the election.
There is some evidence to suggest that this scenario is playing out. Despite having Romney
up by seven points nationally, Gallup has Obama winning every region of the country but
the South. The reason Gallup still has Romney winning is that Obama wins all of his
regions, like the Midwest, by a small margin. However, Romney wins the South (according to
Gallup) by over twenty points. If those kind of numbers ring true on Election Day Mitt Romney
will undoubtedly win the popular vote, but likely lose the Electoral College. If misery really
does love company, Al Gore may be happier man soon.