In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and Ivan talk about:
Recorded on 23 Sep 2012 Length this week – 1:16:02 |
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The title on this post is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but only a little bit. Romney is way behind in the Electoral College race. He has been all year. He has NEVER been in the lead. As of yesterday’s update even if Romney won every close state he would still lose. With today’s update two more previously close states move toward Obama, making Romney’s best case an even bigger loss and putting him in the worst position he has ever been in… by far. Both changes today just barely take states out of my competitive zone, so new polls in the next few days could easily reverse today’s changes. But even if that happens, the picture for Romney remains bleak. He needs a massive turn around in his fortunes to make this race competitive again, let alone to win. Impossible? No. But increasingly unlikely? Yes. To come back and win at this point Romney needs something huge that turns everything on its head. Could a big black swan event happen? Maybe. But aside from that, he is done. This is over. Lets look at the details. From lower electoral college weight to higher:
Iowa (6 electoral votes) had consistently shown a small Obama lead in the five poll average. Always close. Always a state Romney could potentially flip. But then the convention happened, and 4 out of the 5 polls since then have shown Obama with a lead of more than 5%. (The one outlier is a poll actually showing Romney ahead by 3%.) Today the five poll average hits 5% (exactly) and so I move the state from “Lean Obama” to “Weak Obama”. If the election was held today, this isn’t a state where you would think Romney had a chance. It is now out of reach. As usual, I must say this is “for the moment”. The five poll average now sits at exactly 5%. The next poll could move the state back into competitive territory. And now the big one…
Florida, with 29 electoral votes, was by far the largest of the close states. It has gone back and forth between a Romney lead and an Obama lead in the five poll average, although most of the time there has been a small Obama lead. But it has been close and competitive nearly all year. With today’s update Obama’s lead hits (exactly) 5%. So the state moves from Lean Obama to Weak Obama. As with Iowa, Florida is just barely in this category. The very next poll could make things look more competitive. And we probably should expect some “reversion to the mean” as we go forward. For the moment though, this means that even in Romney’s best case where he wins all the close states, he still loses Florida. Without Iowa and Florida as Romney possibilities, where do things stand?
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Yesterday I said:
I still feel a little hesitant about outright saying this is over. There is still after all more than a month for Romney to turn things around. But Romney’s best case DID get worse. Yesterday Romney already would lose even if he won all of the close states. Today, with Iowa and Florida also moving out of reach, Romney’s best case is starting to look like not just a loss, but a very comfortable Obama win. Iowa and Florida today, and Ohio from yesterday, and maybe some of the other “Weak Obama” states, could move back and get closer before the election. This would not be surprising at all. In fact it would be surprising if Romney slipped too much further behind. At some point he has to rebound a bit, right? But even if he starts closing the gap and stops the free fall, it looks like a really tall order to actually pull ahead. Even at his best point this year the most Romney could say was that if he flipped a few more states from Leaning Obama to Leaning Romney he could win. He was never actually ahead. Even if he does well in the next few weeks, is there anything that indicates he could improve on his position from the beginning of September when he last peaked? Because even then, he was losing. Just by less. Yes, there could be more bad economic news. Yes, Obama could start making huge mistakes and somehow screw this up. But the magnitude of what would be necessary to reverse this gets larger by the day and the scenarios less likely. At this point Romney needs Obama to catastrophically implode. That is unlikely. This is done. Obama wins. Uh… umm…. unless Obama himself screws it up, or something completely unexpected of epic proportions happens. Gotta always add the caveats. :-) Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
Only one state changes category today, but it is an important one, as Obama’s lead in Ohio hits 5%:
With the additions today, the five poll average in Ohio is an Obama lead of EXACTLY 5.0%. I define the “Weak Obama” category as 5% and above though, so this is enough to move the state to the new category. It is right on the edge though. The next day of polls could easily reverse this change. The trend in the last couple weeks has been the opposite, but this could change at any time. For the moment though, it looks like Ohio is moving away from Romney. Obama’s lead is now big enough that my models no longer include the possibility of Romney winning Ohio. This leaves Romney in a very bad spot:
So, even if Romney wins EVERY CLOSE STATE (all of which he is currently behind in), he would still lose to Obama 260 to 278. This is of course “if the election was held today”… and the election is not being held today. But it is still worth repeating: Romney can win every state that is even remotely close, and it is still not enough. HE STILL LOSES. This is the 4th time this year that Romney’s “best case” has been this bad. In each of the previous cases, Romney has subsequently pulled back some of the states where Obama is ahead by more than 5% and made them somewhat competitive again. He hasn’t actually managed to pull enough of them over the line to his side to ever be in the lead in the electoral college, but he has at least managed to make enough states close that he could win if he swept those close states. So now of course the question is: Can he do it again? Can Romney fight back and make some more states close again? Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), Virginia (13), Minnesota (10), Wisconsin (10), Oregon (7), New Mexico (5) and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District (1) are the areas where Obama’s lead is between 5% and 10%. Some of those are probably permanently out of reach. But perhaps Romney can make some of them into a battle again with a massive advertising blitz? Perhaps with the help of a few big stumbles by Obama? I don’t think it can happen without big stumbles by Obama. Romney stopping his tendency to put his foot in his mouth and starting to run a disciplined and competent campaign wouldn’t be enough. He needs Obama to screw up. And even then, can he get past making a few more states close to actually starting to take the lead in some of these states? Let alone enough of them to win the Presidency? It seems unlikely. The scenarios that result in Romney catching up and winning seem more and more far fetched by the day. To be clear, a Romney win is NOT impossible. It could happen. It is just getting less and less likely as time goes on. Obama’s lead is increasing, and Romney is running out of time to catch up. Romney supporters seem to be pushing two main lines of thoughts on how Romney can still win: First off, we still have the debates. Sometimes the debates can drive big changes they say. But everything I’ve been reading over the past couple months with regard to research on this subject says that debates very rarely move the polls any significant amount. Certainly not by a big enough amount to make up this kind of deficit. (Tales of a major reversal of fortune in the Carter/Reagan race after the final debate have been very effectively debunked by several people. It is basically an urban legend driven by looking at one set of polls while ignoring all the others.) Could Obama come out, have a nervous breakdown, start walking in circles and clucking like a chicken on live national television and thereby completely blow his lead? Well, yes, something of that magnitude could do it. But assuming a basically competent debate performance by Obama, even if Romney “wins” debates, it is hard to see them giving Romney the boost he would need to win. Second of all, more and more you hear the argument that the polls must be wrong. That there is a systematic pro-Democratic bias in the polls, and Romney is really doing much better than the polls would indicate, and because Republicans are more motivated, they will have higher turnout and therefore win. The only thing to say here is that as long as you are looking at poll averages and not any particular pollster, the house effects leaning one direction or another basically get averaged out. Also, for the most part even the pollsters that have a partisan alignment are actually motivated to structure their polls to produce results that match the actual outcomes in the end. Even a highly partisan pollster would try to correct a systematic bias in their results if they found one, because it translates into lower predictive value for their polls, which makes them less valuable. Finally, there is just the historical record. People who have convinced themselves that the polls just must be wrong have tended to be disappointed much more often than they’ve ended up being right. So how lopsided does this matchup need to look at this stage in the game to start just saying outright that absent an event of cosmic proportions the race is over and Obama will certainly win? We are very very close. It is tempting to just say so right now. But I will hold off a little bit. But if Romney’s best case gets ANY worse… or if there is no major move in Romney’s direction starting in the next week or two… then it will be very difficult to construct Romney win scenarios with a straight face… …OK, really, it is already very difficult to construct those scenarios. Can he make it closer than it looks today? Sure. Can he move things enough to actually win? That is looking pretty far fetched at the moment. I’ll hold off saying “it is over” for a couple weeks to give Romney a chance to figure out the miracle he needs. Maybe he’ll be able to find and execute on said miracle. Maybe. Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. (Edit 2012 Sep 27 15:28 to add final note.)
Two changes in category today, and bucking the recent trend, they are both moves toward Romney. In reverse order of electoral college weight:
Minnesota (10 electoral votes) had been pretty sparsely polled before the conventions, and the five poll average had shown an Obama lead as high as 11.7% in July. With the batch of new polling in September, Obama’s lead has now dropped to only 7.9%. “Only” is of course relative. 7.9% is still a pretty substantial lead. Minnesota is not in play right now. The only question is how much Obama is going to win by. It looks like Obama’s margin will be less than it once looked like it might be. But this should still be an easy win for Obama.
Tennessee (11 electoral votes) is another state that hasn’t been polled all that often. The last set of polls, back in May, had moved the five poll average to a Romney lead of less than 5%, specifically a 4.2% lead. That had put Tennessee into the set of states my model thought could go either way. After all, a 4.2% lead is pretty slim. The right set of things happening, and perhaps Obama could have actually taken the lead there. Well, the new set of polls added this week, which are actually two related results from YouGov, moves the average to a 5.8% Romney lead. As far as my model is concerned, that pulls Tennessee out of reach for Obama. Tennessee always seemed like a big stretch for Obama. It always seemed a bit odd that it was showing up in the “close states” category. Well, it now resumes a more natural looking position as a “Weak Romney” state, meaning that Romney has a big lead there, but maybe not so big a lead that he should completely ignore it. Of course it will get ignored, because Obama doesn’t need it to win. Any scenario that has Obama winning Tennessee is probably an Obama landslide. So Obama isn’t going to pay attention to it. Meanwhile, if Romney is in a position where he is really fighting to win Tennessee, he has already lost. Given he is way behind right now, he needs to be concentrating on states where Obama is ahead to try to bring them back over to his side of the line. Spending time shoring up a state like Tennessee would be a waste of resources for Romney too. So, no attention for Tennessee. Poor Tennessee. So where does this put the summary? Minnesota has no effect because it was never close. I no longer consider winning Tennessee to be a possibility for Obama, so Obama’s “best case” gets a little worse:
The interesting thing here is of course that the current status is now the same as Obama’s best case. This is because there are no longer ANY close states where Romney is ahead. Tennessee is no longer close because it is now more solidly Romney. So that is good for Romney. Two states moved TOWARD Romney today. This is GOOD for Romney compared to yesterday. But the overall situation remains very very difficult. The remaining close states… Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15), Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Nevada (6), and New Hampshire (4)… are all states where Obama is ahead. Now, all of those states are close, and some of them are very close, with Obama’s lead no more than a sliver. Romney could retake the leads in one or more of these states with a little bit of a good news cycle and just one or two good polls. But what this effectively does is put Obama at his ceiling. Previously, there was headroom above the “current” situation. You could imagine Obama doing a bit better and moving one or more states that were close but leaning Romney to being close but leaning Obama. Now there are no more Romney states that are close… states that one could easily imagine Obama picking up. To do any better than a 347 to 191 win… which is where the state by state polls put him right now… Obama would need to start picking up states where Romney is ahead by more than 5% (but ones where he is ahead by less than 10%, because we need to retain at least some realism). The areas in this category are now Georgia (16), Arizona (11), Indiana (11), Tennessee (11), Missouri (10), South Carolina (9), Montana (3) and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (1). With the possible exception of Nebraska’s 2nd, which is very infrequently polled but where a poll this week showed the race tied, all of these seem like BIG stretches right now. Even if Romney collapses further and Obama expands his national lead, one could maybe see some of these getting closer again, but they have a long way to go to actually end up in the Obama win column. As he was looking at the wiki between my update there and this post, a reader asked a question: Has this happened before? I knew it hadn’t happened in this cycle, but I had a vague memory of there being some time in 2008 where all the close states were leaning in one direction. But I was wrong. Looking at my 2008 analysis, this didn’t happen then either. (I wasn’t doing this in 2004 or before, so I can’t speak to those years.) So indeed,with my method of classifying states… with leads in a five poll average less than 5% being considered “close” states that could go either way… this is the first time in two election cycles where ALL of the “close” states have leaned toward one candidate. The positive spin for Romney is that Obama has reached a top. It will be very hard for him to do any better in the electoral college than where things are right now. Of course, the flip side of that is that at the moment Obama is pretty far ahead, and to win Romney has to win almost all of the close states… all of which he is behind in at the moment. This is not where a candidate wants to be in late September. It isn’t quite time to just call the race for Obama and go home. But it is getting close. Last time around I “called the race” on October 3rd. In 2008 that was the first time we had a situation where McCain’s “best case” in my model was still losing. I didn’t actually think that situation would be sustained through November, but it the end it was. From October 3rd onward, the state by state polls showed a clear Obama win. This time around, Romney has already been in that “best case is to lose” situation in my model three times. Each time he has recovered, but if Obama increases his lead in one or two key states, he could end up there again pretty easily. Unlike the last three times, there will be very little time to recover if he falls that far behind again. Of course, he would have to not just improve from that point, he would have to get to a point better than he has been at any time this year to actually pull into the lead. At this very moment, his “current” line is well behind where McCain’s was four years ago too. Four years ago today it looked like McCain would get 256 electoral votes if the election was held then. That wasn’t enough to put him in the lead of course, but it was a lot better than the 191 Romney has in his column at the moment. Romney needs some major game changing event to make this an interesting race again. He is running out of time for it. He must wake up every day hoping that Obama will make some major mistake. Instead though, in the last few weeks anyway, it seems like it is Romney putting his foot in his moth over and over again. That isn’t what he needs to be able to start closing the gap, let alone to take the lead. Note: With a new poll that I added to my spreadsheet today, the date that Wisconsin moved from Lean Obama to Weak Obama shifts from September 20th to September 21st. The trend chart at the top of this post reflects that adjustment. Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
No truly new polls today, but I added some more slightly older ones from Polltracker now that I am using them as a source as well. They have a few that were not included by my other sources. In any case, only one change came out of that today:
With this, the five poll average in Virginia goes back above 5%. If I’d gotten the polls “in order”, Virginia actually would not have dipped below 5% yesterday at all. Polls arrive out of order all the time of course. As I’ve mentioned before, with a few exceptions when I find really old polls, I mark changes in category based on my best knowledge as of any given day, I don’t try to retroactively change the status on past days. In any case, Obama now leads by 5.3% in the five poll average. So, Virginia once again leaves the group of states I consider possible for Romney to win… if the election was held today that is. Things can of course change. In the mean time though, the summary:
Virginia may be bouncing around the 5% Obama lead line at the moment, but be it a little below or a little above, either way, it is a state that would make Romney’s electoral math much easier if it was actually in play. At the moment, it is just out of reach. Without it, Romney’s road is pretty hard. It has been pointed out that although the state by state math looks bad, if there are campaign events that bring a uniform national move toward Romney, then a bunch of states will of course move in his direction too. That is how it works. States that are leaning Obama will start leaning Romney. States that are weak Obama and currently out of reach will start being close. This kind of move is very possible. No chickens should be being counted by the Democrats. But time is running out for things to happen (either positive things from Romney, or mistakes by Obama) which bring about that kind of move. Polls looking into how set people are on the candidates they support at the moment show a pretty small percentage of actual undecided or “persuadable” people though. So it may be pretty difficult to bring about that kind of move. As I’ve said before, to get there we probably need a major screwup by Obama as opposed to anything Romney could do to bring people toward him. Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.
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