Cheer Up! We’re Winning!

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Sam Wang on David Brooks —

It was fun to learn of David Brooks’s addiction to polling data. He spends countless hours on them, looking at aggregators, examining individual polls, and sniffing poll internals. From all of this, what has he learned?

  1. Today, President Obama would be a bit more likely to win.
  2. There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney.

(Emphasis mine.)

I am having a sad. All of that effort, and his two conclusions still have two major errors. Evidently he does not read the Princeton Election Consortium. Let us dissect this.

First — in truth, says Professor Wang, President Obama is a lot more likely to win. He calculates the probability of an Obama electoral college win at about 90 percent.

Second — the Professor says the Romney surge ended about October 11 and began to reverse on October 16. Nate Silver is a bit more cautious about the probability of an Obama win (73 percent as of this morning), but he agrees Ro-mentum is over. Nate says Romney peaked on October 12 and has been losing ground since.

See also the RAND tracking poll and the most recent Pew state results.

18 thoughts on “Cheer Up! We’re Winning!”

  1. I’m glad for some good news.
    If you watch Cup O’ Schmoe’s show, he’s pushing the MSM “It’s a close race, and Mitt has a good chance of winning. He’s ahead in a lot of polls.” And then he brings in Mike Alien and Jim VanderHEIL from PolitiCON, and they spew their usual garbage.

    And we’ll have to see what happens if Hurricane Sandy, or “Frankenstorm,” is as bad as they say, and hits the NE as badly as they’re predicting.
    Can a massive storm, it’s damage, and the GOVERNMENT’S reaction to any potential disaster, affect the election?
    If President Obama handles it well, which I expect him to, isn’t that a selling point for him?
    If I were him, right now, I’d be pushing the importance of the National Weather Service, which the Republicans want to cut money to, or privatize, and how that GOVERNMENT agency does a lot of good saving lives and property.

    My mom and I are going to have to dip into her limited savings to buy some emergency water, batteries, and canned goods, just in case. Plus, we have a lot of tall trees, and, if that’s not bad enough, they’re still loaded with leaves. And it MAY snow!
    OY GEVALT!

    • Yeah, I decided I’d better prepare for Frankenstorm, too. I’m going out this morning to stock up on stuff.

      Can a massive storm, it’s damage, and the GOVERNMENT’S reaction to any potential disaster, affect the election?

      It might serve as a reminder that, sometimes, you need big government. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad, though.

  2. I want enough EV’s so that we don’t *need* Ohio. And I want the whole thing to be OVER, so I can have my weekends to myself again instead of canvassing….

  3. Thanks for the cheerful news – I read Nate Silver last night before bed and recall his 70+ percent figure; Dr Wang’s 90% makes me feel much better. Agree with Tom_B about Ohio.

  4. I’m not surprised that Brooksie is as bad at interpreting polls as he is at interpreting real life. Maybe he’d be better if they displayed polling information at those mythical Applebee’s salad bars.

    I’m glad to hear you East Coasters are getting ready for the coming storm. The last track I looked at had the hurricane heading right for my aunt’s house in southern New Jersey, and I remember from growing up in Connecticut how badly things can get snarled up when a storm knocks out the infrastructure that keeps millions of people in the region warm, and able to move around. You could be in for quite a week next week.

  5. sniffing poll internals

    Brooks is doing that? Eyew. Hot shower: wire brush.

    Northeasterners, good luck with “Frankenstorm.” Somebody needs to stop nicknaming these dangerous threats with such amusing names, because I chuckle first and then have to compose my serious face.

  6. Sandy screwed up my work schedule in Miami yesterday, now she’s messing up my day here in Kissimmee. We’re getting semi-heavy rain bands and winds gusting to 40mph.
    A good day to stay indoods and fart around on the computer.
    Here’s hoping y’all don’t get wacked !

  7. have to agree with CU…after the morning joe today – well lets just say I was really friggin stressed me out- just like when I drink too much joe, now that I think of it.. I cannot wait for this to just be over and done with.

    My problem with election season is that it brings the wingnuts one can normally just ignore out in droves. It will take four years just to get the bad wingnut taste out of Lady Liberety’s mouth.

    It never fails.Before election season can even get ramped up to total insanity the right has me asking myself WTF are we doing here? I feel like I am in a bad relationship with half the country and we should have gotten a divorce years ago because I cannot fix it.
    “United” really is a big fat load of crap. What can possible unite us? Why do we keep pretending? The right has no desire to be united with the left -so why is it we still try? Every election season I am reminded to the extreme how strong the case for breaking up is. The right and left just fight and no one is ever happy so whats the point?

  8. Please be safe everyone! And if you get blown out of state make sure you end up in a swing state and VOTE.

  9. This is good news–especially so early here on the west coast. Good luck with the storm. Everyone stay safe as I bask in 60 degrees in Westeren Washington.

  10. Please be safe everyone! And if you get blown out of state make sure you end up in a swing state and VOTE.

    I love it!

  11. Thanks, maha. As I’ve been saying for a year now, election season is a media event and as such it’s portrayed as a never-ending, neck-and-neck horse race. Not rocket science to figure out as where does the bulk of campaign money go but to the media which would definitely lose multitudes of viewers were the ‘race’ no race at all.

  12. “It never fails.Before election season can even get ramped up to total insanity the right has me asking myself WTF are we doing here? I feel like I am in a bad relationship with half the country and we should have gotten a divorce years ago because I cannot fix it.”

    Well said, Joan. A lot of us feel the same way.

  13. Actually that was justme’s comment but I agree with you, goatherd, it was well said! It does feel like an ugly oughta-divorce situation.

    I have to face another family Thanksgiving this year with some very conservative in-laws of my brother’s. Not even my in-laws! Now, to be fair, some of them are very delightful people, when talking about family histories or knitting or pets or other things equally benign. So I’m never sure, when things get uncomfortable do I blame them or do I blame politics? Oh, the humanity!

  14. OT, Mike Lofgren, reviews an analog to our own USA, in How Democracies Die:

    Picture a country at the height of its international power and prestige. It has military forces stationed around the globe. It is an intellectual leader. Its citizens are pleased to insist that the national idea, their country’s way of life, is a beacon of enlightenment and human rights for the rest of the world. Indeed, they are wont to harp on the notion that the country embodies the very concept of Western Civilization.

    But beneath the façade of greatness there is creeping rot. The rich (who are accustomed to getting their way in all things) corrupt the system and buy the people’s representatives in this venerable democracy. The country lurches towards political polarization and, predictably, the machinery of orderly governance becomes gridlocked. The politicians of the right, who take every opportunity to bellow for increased spending on the military, refuse to raise the revenues to pay for it. Why?

    Because the wealthy citizens who happen to own these representatives refuse to pay a single cent in additional income taxes. Their class solidarity as alleged “‘job creators”‘ who are owed unconditional deference outweighs their loyalty to the nation at large. They successfully demand that even the crushing expense of a long war should be paid for by loans from abroad (the interest payments on which merely add to the expense) rather than by direct taxes from those citizens best able to afford them. Naturally, a growing share of the population develops a visceral sense that the system is rigged.

    There is worse to come. There gradually coalesces a bitterly reactionary political alliance between the plutocratic rich; a retrograde religious Right seeking to roll back the secular state; hidebound militarists; and the species of glib, pseudo-intellectual malcontents who are drawn to political extremism like iron filings to a magnet. They all seek a purported restoration of a country that never existed: a pious, socially harmonious nation where everybody else knows their place. The political groupings of the center and left, on the other hand, are dithering, irresolute, and have not the courage of their own alleged convictions.

    This uncomfortably familiar-sounding litany of social dysfunction actually refers to the French Third Republic (1870-1940)….

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