this is an insightful observation!

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If you look at the key states and the national average Obama is at or above 50%. If McCain wins all the undecided, McCain draws at best.

To succeed now, McCain must change the votes of people who have already decided. This is a tough problem which is perhaps discussed cogently in:

h*tp://election.princeton.edu/2008/10/28/covert-decisionmaking-and-the-bradley-effect/#more-2070

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The following is a nice discussion of the present polls and their behaviors:

A note on the polls

One thing that becomes clear is that given the demographic changes in the electorate, it is unclear what the right models are.

I believe Jay Cost is correct, the only ting we know for sure from the polls is that Obama is almost certainly ahead (and cherry picking polls to demonstrate one’s point is bad science, bad logic, and plausibly bad argumentation: it discredits your position).

The issue of course is that the national polls are only a beauty contest. Under the electroal college system, it is the state polls that count.

Interestingly enough, for perhaps the same reason that the electoral college protects us from certain voting behaviors, it also makes the state polls more tractable.

And the message here is that unless there is a systematic bias in the polls, the central limit theorem suggests that if the vote were held today, Obama would gain over 270 electoral votes.

From outkast’s and victoria’s perspectvie, I suggest there are two issues which remain of merit:

1) how will the polls change in the next 6 days

2) what will be the immpact of the early voting

And without understanidng 2, 1 becomes ambiguous.

And at this point we wont really know 2 until after the vote count.

So in summary: at this point all that we can really say from the polls is that it appears that Obama is ahead and it appears that his lead gives him 270 or more electroal college votes as of today.

But in truth we are now waiting until next Tuesday (although the impact of Obama’s session tonight will be interesting to guage! ).

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so what are the accurate models outkast?

Can you explain your mathematical formulation here?

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I suggest that arguing that those voting for Obama are unpatriotic is shall we say on the edges of the the blog policy.

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Outkast is unable to explain his comments in 37, perhaps you could speak for him as usual?

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HOW TRUE your comments. Blessings my friend!

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I did not know you were a statistician. Please enlighten us as to why you find the Gallop expanded model to be inaccurate.

Also, why do you insist Peter did not speak for himself on September 12th? Here is what he wrote. It is very clearly written:

#118 BY Peter Leavitt 09.12.08 AT 5:26 PM
Being market oriented, I find Intrade to be better than polls on predicting the presidential race odds. At Intrade you can bet real money on the election. Not too long ago the Intrade market odds had Obama at 68 and McCain at 30. Today Obama is at 45.1 and McCain at 53.0.

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And you can stop telling untruths about Peter Leavitt too. The Christians on this blog simply roll our eyes when you say distorted things about our brother in Christ.

BTW, I added you to our church’s prayer chain at prayer meeting tonight. We’re praying that you end your cynical ways and repent. God can do anything, you know!

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