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Posted on 11/04/2012 1:13:19 PM PST by Red Steel
Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final days of the presidential campaign. In the Pew Research Center’s election weekend survey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Romney among likely voters.
The survey finds that Obama maintains his modest lead when the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken into account. Our final estimate of the national popular vote is Obama 50% and Romney 47%, when the undecided vote is allocated between the two candidates based on several indicators and opinion
(Excerpt) Read more at people-press.org ...
The same as yours. Romney will win.
Only 2 more days.
I don’t believe these polls one bit. My gage is 2010. Romney will win by +4. We swept in 2010. No one expected it. Even though he wasn’t on the ballot, we were really voting against obama back then. We took the house and several governorships. The crowds Romney is drawing are amazing. What drives people out in the cold to wait for hours? They are desperate to get America back to being America. Nothing has changed since 2010..... except we are even more determined than ever to oust the dictator.
If anything it likely many Democrats are voting GOP as well.
If it were just Rove I would agree with you, but you have George Will, and M. Barone as well stating that this is going to be a Romney win.
+4 is still oversampling Democrats, this is going to be a R+1.
What irks me is that they ignore the positive polls and they keep saying 'we were all fooled in 2008', which is untrue.
Very few Freepers thought McCain was going to win that race once he suspended his campaign.
Good you stick with that nonsense, you will look like a fool on Wednesday.
They have acknowledged that the House is going to remain GOP and that they aren't going to pick up many seats, if any.
+1.
Now, M.Barone has stated that this is going to be a Romney win, but I guess he doesn't know anything about election data?
How did Pew do on 2010-predict the GOP taking the House?
Because you don’t want to just talk to the person who picked up the phone. In most households the majority of the time it is picked up by the same person. It’s an effort to randomize the sample. Just talking to whoever picks up the phone brings a bias into the sample.
At this point we will just wait for the results. I think Obama is going to win a close race. I had hoped to see some momentum in polling the Governor's way to persuade me that the fundamentals of the race had changed in his direction, unfortunately I'm just not seeing it. In fact, it looks to me like the movement ended up being Obama's way. I suspect hurricane Sandy stopped Romney's momentum.
Now I do agree Republicans are pretty fired up and will turn out in significant numbers, but I also think the Democratic turnout operation is immense and that they will also turn out enough of their dependent, minority voters to match and exceed ours.
This race appears to be roughly a 51 O 49 R contest. Going out on a limb and predicting a precise result I'd say it will be Obama 50 - Romney 49 - Other 1. Obama will win Ohio narrowly and that will put him over the top.
I've seen lots of races likes this with everyone predicting the polls are wrong and, unfortunately, the consensus of the polls is rarely wrong. I also think the country has simply changed demographically so much that it is becoming more and more difficult for conservatives/Republicans to win in states like Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, etc. In another generation we might even struggle to hold Arizona and Texas. I could be wrong of course, but I think we are on a glidepath to Greece. Saying that, Romney ran a very good campaign and did about as good as any candidate could do under the circumstances.
Looks like pew ran an honest poll in 2010. But it’s pretty clear they’re running a dishonest poll in 2012. Pew is no where near Gallup or Rasmussen which have Romney 49 - Obama 48.
Pew 2010 midterms poll:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1773/poll-2010-midterm-gop-lead-early-voting-campaign-outreach-engagement-reactions-victory-defeat
How does this square with Rasmussen's own poll showing Romney up only 1 today?
Because it points at not only a Romney win, but a landslide. Or is this one of those rare cases where polls are fallible?
Rasmussen's polls do not point to a landslide. They point to an essentially tied race.
And the Gallup poll that everyone was hanging their hat on now has Romney up only 1 now, despite their statement that this will be a much more Republican friendly electorate.
I'm sorry, I agree with Sabato, Cook, etc. This is a close race but the Democratic turnout machine in the key swing states is probably just too much for Romney to overcome. The consensus of polls shows Obama up fractionally. I think to win, Romney would have needed to be up a couple with momentum in his direction. In that case he might have won it going away.
I know you say that the polls are rarely wrong, but don't certain things give you pause?
Yes. I fully concede I could be wrong. There are some things that make me wonder if my prediction is correct. All these educated guesses are predicated on the Democratic turnout machine. If their enthusiasm is too much less than I suspect it is, Romney might have an edge. But I've seen this before - our side is jacked up and we make wrong assumptions that the other won't turn out. The problem is polling is showing that, while certainly not at a 1008 levels of excitement, the left is going to turn out.
I don’t think you understood my question (probably my fault). The polls are showing a tight race, with Obama probably leading. The issue is whether they are all built around faulty assumptions. Specifically, the relative turnout of D and R.
Rasmussen’s party affiliation poll has a good track-record in predicting actual turnout. That poll is completely at odds with the assumptions built into all preference polls (including, ironically enough, Rasmussen’s). My question to you is:
do you believe that this poll is an outlier?
My other question would be this: predicting an Obama victory is safe. If you are wrong, then you can always say that everyone else did to. Why then are people like Barone, Rove, Severin, Dick Morris, and now Peggy Noonan going out on such a limb in predicting a Romney victory/landslide? Why stake their reputation in that way, unless their sources are telling them something that is at complete odds with the polling consensus?
Occam’s razor would appear to apply here. The simplest explanation is that the facts on the ground don’t support the polling consensus’ assumptions, and internal polls don’t either. And these well-connected insiders are willing to stake their reputation on the actual data, as opposed to made-for-tv polls. Given the behavior of the Romney and Obama campaigns, they too don’t believe that the consensus is accurate, either.
Don’t waste your breath my friend. Longbow has had this explained to him/her about a hundred times on a dozen threads in the past few days.
I'm really not sure what to tell you. These are mostly all conservatives you listed and in a close race, it is to be expected they will say they think Romney will win. Some may really believe that, others, like Rove, are probably just towing the party line. They are on our side and lose some of their ability to be objective. I try to be objective at all costs.
For me to believe Mitt was going to win, I'd have needed to see poll movement breaking for him over the last couple days of the race. I am not seeing that. If anything, it looks like the majority of the polls are breaking towards Obama. Gallup was our best poll, and now we are down to a 1 point lead. Pew and ABC/Post now have Obama with a 3 point lead. To beat an incumbent, we needed to have everything break our way and I just don't see it.
Look you can point out the D+ numbers in these polls, but I honestly don't think most people commenting on that have the slightest clue what they are talking about. To give you an idea how silly its become, we have whole websites trying to "unskew" polls. You can't just re-weight a poll to "unskew" it. That's absurd. Pollsters are simply finding more self described Democrats in their poll. For a whole host of reasons a lot of center right voters are describing themselves as Independents in a majority of the polling done recently. When specifically pushed via questions into one party or another you see the Republicans doing better, but in the average poll the high D+ number and unusual pro-Romney independent sentiment are because of the way people self identify.
I will stick to my prediction. If anything I think this thing will break a little more to Obama. I see it as generally a 51 O - 49 R race. It's going to be a heartbreaker for a lot of people who I honestly don't think even considered the idea that Obama could be re-elected.
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