Who will win the election?
Not, who do you want to win the election........put your money where your mouth is and post your vote where it can't be reversed later.
Originally Posted by dearhunter
Ten days out, and it's a real horse race.
I don't bet on elections, and probably never will, but would pick Obama if forced to do so. In fact, I would probably lay odds based on the assumption that the probablility of his re-election is at least 0.65. Polls show that the popular vote is very close, but analysts note that the electoral map breaks down in Obama's favor.
Many people in the world of investments and finance think Nate Silver is one of the best analysts. He and his assistants run large numbers of electoral vote simulations, and he wrote recently that there's approximately a 0.50 probablilty that Ohio will be absolutely determinative.
If that's true, the status of current economic conditions in Ohio is very good news for Obama. Ohio's business climate is not the best in the nation, but it's better than most, and it's going in the right direction. It's
wonderful relative to that of Illinois, for example, which seems intent on emulating the fiscal recklessness of California. That's unambiguously good news for Obama's re-election chances, irrespective of whether voters really think his policies have much to do with the region's recovery.
Here's one thing I've wondered, though:
How accurate are today's polls? It seems to me that to a greater extent every year, poll responses are skewed toward something that looks like the representation of a shrinking sample space -- those with the highest propensity to answer calls to landline phones from "out of area" or "anonymous" numbers. How can pollsters reach a representative sample? For instance, perhaps tens of millions of younger adults don't even have landline phones nowadays.
Presumably, pollsters have developed models to adjust for that sort of skewness. Maybe they're fairly accurate, maybe not. If not, there may be some very embarrassed pollsters!
In any case, I suspect that a lot of people will be staying up late on election night to see what happened.
I just hope there's a clean result without a year 2000 Florida-style clusterfuck.
Or worse,
several Florida-style clusterfucks!