PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORAL VOTE PREDICTIONS 6OKT12

PREDICTIONS from InTrade, HuffPost, ElectoralVote.com and Five Thirty Eight.....
InTrade

Obama

Electoral votes

294

Solid: 240

Leaning: 54

Solid: 191

Leaning: 15

206

Romney

Electoral votes

Needs to win

0

64

Tossup (38)

The probabilities shown on this map are the last trade prices for each market.

Select a State

You can see more information about a state by clicking it on the map.

http://www.intrade.com/v4/misc/electoral-map/

HUFFPOST

The current view of the 2012 presidential election.

Updated Saturday, Oct. 6 3:55 pm ET

Barack Obama

281

Electoral Votes

270 to win

Mitt Romney

206

Electoral Votes

251 Strong Obama

30 Leans Obama

51 Tossup

15 Leans Romney

191 Strong Romney

Recent changes

10/6	F	→	F	Colo.
10/6	a	→	a	N.C.
10/5	g	→	g	Nev.
10/5	X	→	X	Mo.
10/5	i	→	i	Ohio
10/5	s	→	s	Va.

Our snapshot of where the presidential race stands is based on hundreds of state-wide and national opinion polls — filtered through a poll-tracking model — and updated throughout the day.

Share on Facebook Make Your Own Map

State by State

Democrat

Republican

		Pollster Outlook			Past results
State	Electoral votes	Obama	Romney	Margin	'08	'04	'00
B Alabama	9	36%	58%	Romney +22	R	R	R
A Alaska	3				R	R	R
D Arizona	11	42%	52%	Romney +10	R	R	R
C Arkansas	6	34%	59%	Romney +25	R	R	R
E California	55	57%	37%	Obama +20	D	D	D
F Colorado	9	48%	46%	Tossup	D	R	R
G Connecticut	7	52%	42%	Obama +10	D	D	D
H Delaware	3				D	D	D
y District of Columbia	3				D	D	D
I Florida	29	47%	48%	Tossup	D	R	R
J Georgia	16	41%	54%	Romney +13	R	R	R
K Hawaii	4	62%	32%	Obama +30	D	D	D
M Idaho	4				R	R	R
N Illinois	20	57%	37%	Obama +20	D	D	D
O Indiana	11	42%	52%	Romney +10	D	R	R
L Iowa	6	49%	44%	Obama +5	D	R	D
P Kansas	6				R	R	R
Q Kentucky	8	38%	56%	Romney +18	R	R	R
R Louisiana	8	39%	54%	Romney +15	R	R	R
U Maine	4	55%	38%	Obama +17	D	D	D
T Maryland	10	56%	37%	Obama +19	D	D	D
S Massachusetts	11	58%	36%	Obama +22	D	D	D
V Michigan	16	50%	43%	Obama +7	D	D	D
W Minnesota	10	50%	43%	Obama +7	D	D	D
Y Mississippi	6				R	R	R
X Missouri	10	43%	51%	Romney +8	R	R	R
Z Montana	3	43%	51%	Romney +8	R	R	R
c Nebraska	5	40%	53%	Romney +13	R*	R	R
g Nevada	6	50%	45%	Obama +5	D	R	R
d New Hampshire	4	51%	43%	Obama +8	D	D	R
e New Jersey	14	53%	41%	Obama +12	D	D	D
f New Mexico	5	50%	43%	Obama +7	D	R	D
h New York	29	59%	35%	Obama +24	D	D	D
a North Carolina	15	46%	49%	Romney +3	D	R	R
b North Dakota	3	40%	53%	Romney +13	R	R	R
i Ohio	18	48%	45%	Obama +3	D	R	R
j Oklahoma	7	29%	64%	Romney +35	R	R	R
k Oregon	7	50%	43%	Obama +7	D	D	D
l Pennsylvania	20	50%	43%	Obama +7	D	D	D
m Rhode Island	4	60%	34%	Obama +26	D	D	D
n South Carolina	9	41%	52%	Romney +11	R	R	R
o South Dakota	3	42%	52%	Romney +10	R	R	R
p Tennessee	11	42%	52%	Romney +10	R	R	R
q Texas	38	39%	55%	Romney +16	R	R	R
r Utah	6	28%	66%	Romney +38	R	R	R
t Vermont	3	66%	28%	Obama +38	D	D	D
s Virginia	13	47%	47%	Tossup	D	R	R
u Washington	12	55%	39%	Obama +16	D	D	D
w West Virginia	5	38%	55%	Romney +17	R	R	R
v Wisconsin	10	51%	44%	Obama +7	D	D	D
x Wyoming	3				R	R	R

*In 2008, Nebraska's electoral votes were split. McCain took four of the state's five electoral votes and Obama took one.

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/romney-vs-obama-electoral-map?hw&utm_expid=51845510-0&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Felections-2012%2F 

ELECTORALVOTE.COM

Obama 319

Ties 13

Romney 206

Senate

Dem 52

Ties 3

GOP 45

• Strongly Dem (214)
• Likely Dem (43)
• Barely Dem (62)
• Exactly tied (13)
• Barely GOP (25)
• Likely GOP (34)
• Strongly GOP (147)

270 Electoral votes needed to win Map algorithm explained

New polls: FL NM OH VA

Dem pickups: (None)

GOP pickups: IN NC

Polls Show Debate Momentum for Romney Quote of the Day Latest Swing State Polls How Obama Remade Romney 7 Ways Obama Should Change His Debate Strategy Romney Gets Big Boost After Debate

News from the Votemaster

Early Voting Reinstated in Ohio

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th circuit has reinstated early voting for the weekend just before election day for all voters. The Ohio Secretary of State, Jon Husted (R), had earlier decided that only military families could vote on the three days before election day. This was a more-or-less naked attempt to suppress Democratic votes since he knew very well that many Democrats, especially minorities and poorer voters, could not take time off from work on election day and thus preferred voting during the weekend before election day. The panel said that there was no compelling reason to allow one group of voters to vote during the weekend and prohibit other voters from doing the same thing.
Husted said he would decide Monday what to do. He could appeal the decision to the full 6th circuit court or even appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The latter might be a bit gun shy about deciding another election case so soon after 2000 though.

Democrats Fight Voter Suppression Laws with Voter Encouragement Laws

While Republican-controlled states have passed various laws to make voting harder, states controlled by the Democrats have passed laws making it easier. California, as it so often does, has taken the lead here, enacting laws allowing voters to register online and also to register in person on election day.
Expanding/contracting the vote has not always been partisan. In the 1990s, Republican states like Idaho and Wyoming instituted election-day registration. It was seen as a service to voters whereas now changing the election laws is a partisan tactic to win elections.

How Bipartisan Was Romney as Governor?

During the debate, Mitt Romney repeatedly claimed that as governor he worked with the Democratic controlled Massachusetts state legislature in a constructive way to get things done. This is music to the ears of the bipartisanship fetishists who don't realize the reason that Congress is dysfunctional is not that the individual members are acting like petulant children but that the parties' goals are diametricallly opposed. What the Republicans want at all costs is lower taxes and what the Democrats want is better government services. These two things are fundamentally incompatible, which is why the parties can't agree on anything.
A closer inspection of Romney's term as governor shows the same forces were at work at the state level. The Democrats controlled over 85% of the seats in the state legislature, so Romney was forced to work with them. Nevertheless, he exercised his veto power 844 times during his term, only to have the vast majority of his vetoes overridden. As a result, laws and budgets were passed, but not due to some spirit of cooperation. They became law because the Democrats repeatedly shoved legislation Romney opposed down his throat due to their veto-proof majority.
Pretty much his only legislative achievement, universal health insurance, was something Democrats had dreamed of for decades. Romney knew that if he vetoed it, his veto would just be overridden and since the plan was essentially that of the conservative Heritage Foundation ("make everyone buy insurance from a private insurance company") he figured that if he went along with it, he would get credit for it. Little did he know that a future Democratic President would pass the same plan on a national scale and then the Republicans would revolt against a plan they themselves had been championing for 15 years.
In short, there is relatively little evidence of bipartisanship during Romney's term as governor. Most of his campaign promises, such as restructuring the state government, overhauling the state university, consolidating the transportation agencies, and bringing new jobs to the state went unfulfilled because the Democrats opposed them.

Democrats Counting on Biden to Attack the Ryan Plan for Replacing Medicare

Democrats clearly understand that Obama failed to make the case against Paul Ryan's plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system. They are hoping that with the author of the plan, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), on stage Thursday in a debate with Vice President Joe Biden, the subject will be thoroughly discussed. It will be difficult for Ryan to evade the issue since he is the author of the plan. Biden, who, unlike Obama, loves attacking the Republicans, is sure to do everything he can to make it clear to seniors and near-seniors that their current right to whatever medical care they need would be replaced by a lump-sum payment from the government and instructions to go buy private insurance with it. Polls have shown that once people understand this, large majorities oppose it. When Ryan talked about his plan at the AARP convention in late September, he was roundly booed.
What will be tricky for Biden is to explain some of the implications for the distant future. In V1.0 of Ryan's plan, everyone just got a voucher for private insurance and that was it. There was much criticism of it from people who said: "What if someone is so sick no insurance company will take him or her?" So in V2.0, Ryan added a provision that people could buy into Medicare if they wanted.
Now here is the rub. Insurance companies see this as a godsend. They will devise policies that appeal to the young old but not the old old. Their goal will be to get healthy seniors to buy private insurance with their vouchers while discouraging sick ones from doing so by making the plans unattractive, for example, with annual limits on payments, large copayments, etc. The sick seniors will then opt for Medicare. In the long run, Medicare will be insuring mostly very old, very sick, people, so it will become insolvent and future Republicans will call it a drain on the taxpayers and work to abolish it. Biden's problem is to explain this in such a way that people in their 40s and 50s see the threat down the road.

Why Isn't Romney Really Rich?

An interesting piece in the Washington Post asks the question why Mitt Romney isn't really rich. Yes, he is worth $250 million, which is more than Joe Sixpack is worth, but when compared to the big players in the private equity world, the Henry Kravis and Steve Schwarzman types, Romney's bank account is small potatoes. Why isn't he a billionaire like they are? After all, he ran Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s, when gogo funds made real money.
Several possible explanations are offered. Possibly Romney shared the wealth with his seven partners very generously. A second possibility is that he is really a billionaire but for political reasons is hiding most of his wealth. Yet a third possibility is that he was not nearly as good a businessman as some of the others in the private equity business. There might be other explanations, but Romney is not talking.

Romney Drops Talking Point

One of the main points in Mitt Romney's stump speech is that unemployment has been above 8% for 43 straight months. Now that it has dropped to 7.8%, Romney has lost a key talking point. Of course, he could say that unemployment has been above 7.7% for 44 straight months, but that is somehow less convincing.
But on a deeper level, the economy is becoming a less potent issue for Romney. Historically, voters react more to the direction of the unemployment numbers than to their absolute value. Since the trend is in the right direction, this is likely to help, rather than hurt, Obama next month.

Will Black Voters Turn Out in Virginia and North Carolina?

The key to Obama's historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina in 2008 was the enormous turnout among black voters. Now many observers are asking if they will do this again. The Obama campaign is not so sure, so it has dispatched Michelle Obama to North Carolina to speak at several historically black colleges there to get the students excited.

Today's Presidential Polls

Rasmussen is out with polls in three key swing states, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, that show much closer races than all the other pollsters. Rasmussen has been criticized in the past for using a model of the electorate that contains more Republicans than other pollsters have seen. Of course, he could be right and everyone else wrong or the first debate could have made some people change their minds. We will have a better idea when other pollsters release polls taken after the debate.

State	Obama	Romney		Start	End	Pollster
Florida	47%	49%		Oct 04	Oct 04	Rasmussen
New Mexico	52%	43%		Oct 02	Oct 03	PPP
Ohio	50%	49%		Oct 04	Oct 04	Rasmussen
Virginia	48%	49%		Oct 04	Oct 04	Rasmussen

Today's Senate Polls

State	Democrat	D %	Republican	R %	I	I %	Start	End	Pollster
New Mexico	Martin Heinrich	51%	Heather Wilson	41%			Oct 02	Oct 03	PPP
Virginia	Tim Kaine	52%	George Allen	45%			Oct 04	Oct 04	Rasmussen

* Denotes incumbent
---The Votemaster

http://electoral-vote.com/

 

FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

Oct. 6: Romney Maintains Poll Momentum

Nov. 6 Forecast

Mitt Romney

227.5

+8.8 since Sept. 29 

Barack Obama

310.6

-8.7 since Sept. 29

By NATE SILVER

Mitt Romney continues to show improved numbers in polls published since the presidential debate in Denver on Wednesday and has now made clear gains in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. The forecast gives him roughly a 20 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, up from about 15 percent before the debate. Mr. Romney’s gains in the polls have been sharp enough that he should continue to advance in the FiveThirtyEight forecast if he can maintain his numbers over the next couple of days.
Four of the five national polls published on Saturday showed improvement for Mr. Romney. In the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, which conducted about two-thirds of its interviews after the debate, we went from a two-point deficit against Barack Obama to a two-point lead. Mr. Romney gained two points in the Gallup tracking poll, which now shows him down by three. He also gained roughly 1.5 percentage points in the RAND Corporation’s online tracking poll, reversing a gain that Mr. Obama had made on Friday. And a companion pair of polls published by Clarus Research Group just before and after the debate showed a five-point swing toward Mr. Romney. He trailed Mr. Obama by four points in a poll that Clarus Research Group conducted on Tuesday night, before the debate, but led him by one point in a poll they conducted on Thursday.
All of these national surveys except for the Clarus Research Group poll still contain some predebate interviews, meaning that they may underestimate the gains that Mr. Romney may eventually realize. This particularly holds for the Gallup and RAND Corporation tracking polls, which use seven-day filed periods; only about 30 percent of the interviews in those polls postdate the debate. In general, the surveys seem to be consistent with a universe in which Mr. Romney has been poling about evenly with Mr. Obama nationwide in interviews conducted after the debates.
There were few state polls published on Saturday, but a Gravis Marketing poll of Colorado also showed a sharp reversal toward Mr. Romney. He led in its newest survey, which was conducted on Thursday after the debate, by 3.5 percentage points. Although Gravis Marketing polls have had a very strong Republican lean so far this cycle, the trend in the poll is nevertheless extremely favorable for Mr. Romney, since he had trailed Mr. Obama by roughly five percentage points in a poll it conducted in September.
The only poll in which Mr. Romney failed to make gains on Saturday was in the online tracking poll published by Ipsos. That survey showed Mr. Obama holding onto a two-point lead among likely voters, the same as in the poll Ipsos published on Friday, although the numbers were still improved for Mr. Romney from the surveys it had been publishing before the debate.
If there is any silver lining for Mr. Obama in these data, it may be that polls of registered voters show a weaker trend toward Mr. Romney than polls of likely voters. He still leads Mr. Romney by six points in the version of the Ipsos poll among registered voters, for instance, and the Gallup tracking poll, which is conducted among registered rather than likely voters, has not shown an especially sharp shift toward Mr. Romney so far.
Why is this factor favorable for Mr. Obama? Because likely voter polls can be more sensitive than registered voter polls to temporary swings in voter enthusiasm, which sometimes reverse themselves as there are new developments in the news cycle.
More broadly, although it is clear that Mr. Romney has made gains, it is still too early to tell how long-lasting they might be. Many of the polls that showed the sharpest swing toward Mr. Romney were conducted on Thursday, immediately after the debate and on a very unfavorable day of news coverage for Mr. Obama, and will not yet reflect any change in voter sentiment from Friday morning’s favorable jobs report.
Still, as I wrote yesterday, my guess is that the forecast model is still being somewhat too conservative about accounting for the change in the environment. In a good number of the polls, Mr. Romney has not only improved his own standing but also taken voters away from Mr. Obama’s column, suggesting that he has peeled off some of Mr. Obama’s softer support in addition to gaining ground among undecided voters.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/oct-6-romney-maintains-poll-momentum/?emc=eta1