FiveThirtyEight’s Prediction Model Is Failing in the Clinton-Trump Race -- That's According to Its Guru, Nate Silver 5NOV16

HERE's is another look at +FiveThirtyEight polls and predictions for the 2016 elections from +AlterNet . NO matter what the polls show GET OUT AND VOTE BECAUSE DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT AND IF YOU DO NOT VOTE DRUMPF/TRUMP-PENCE WIN.

FiveThirtyEight’s Prediction Model Is Failing in the Clinton-Trump Race -- That's According to Its Guru, Nate Silver

Trump's path is precarious and not one other professional election handicapper records the seismic shift in Trump’s chances that FiveThirtyEight does.

By Arun Gupta / Raw Story

November 5, 2016

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Donald Trump - This BIG! Donald John Trump, Sr., aka Donald Trump, is a celebrity business man and media personality. He is a candidate for president in the 2016 Republican primary. This image of Donald Trump was adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Gage Skidmore's flickr photostream.
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Telling political junkies to stop checking fivethirtyeight.com obsessively is likely to be met by the same hollow-eyed stare from a lab rat that spends its day clicking a lever for bumps of cocaine.

The internet venerates the website’s founder, Nate Silver, as “America’s Chief Wizard” after his statistical polling model correctly predicted the results of the 2012 presidential contest in every state and the District of Columbia. But Silver’s fans are freaking out as Trump’s chance of winning has tripled in two weeks.

However, the wild swings toward Trump are more a sign that an orange-furred monkey wrench has jammed FiveThirtyEight’s soothsaying machine than a candidate who is detested by nearly 60 percent of voters is suddenly floating to the top of the 2016 shitshow. Trump can win and possible hacking of the electoral process increase unpredictability, but his path is still precarious and not one other professional election handicapper records the seismic shift in Trump’s chances that FiveThirtyEight does.

To Silver’s credit, he’s cast doubts on his poll-based forecasting this year. He mentions the lag time in how polls react to dramatic news such as the FBI’s email bombshell. He highlighted a survey showing little movement in voter preferences since January 2016. FiveThirtyEight also notes, “Trump supporters are more likely than Clinton voters to make it through the likely voter screens, indicating they are more vocal and enthusiastic in their support.” In other words, it’s likely Comey’s ill-advised letter about Clinton’s emails has depressed pro-Clinton respondents in polling more than it will at the voting booth. On the flip side, after Clinton’s average lead stretched to 7.1 percent in mid-October, this was likely affected by Trump supporters shunning pollsters, particularly after Trump’s rants about a rigged media, rigged polls, and a rigged election.

If you’re hell-bent on checking FiveThirtyEight constantly (as I still do), then it’s worth keeping in mind reasons why a Clinton victory is likelier than Silver’s model predicts.

The main issue is FiveThirtyEight works best when electoral coalitions are well-defined and change slowly as they have been since Bill Clinton was in office. Trump has scrambled all that, however, and analyzing polls cannot account for rapid demographic shifts. Trump’s bastion of working-class white men includes significant numbers of Democrats who’ve crossed over since 2012. But he’s alienated typically Republican college-educated whites and spurred Latinos, Asians, and Muslims to mobilize in record numbers to defeat him. And the gender gap is wider than ever, with women favoring Clinton over Trump by an average of 16 points in October polls. The focus on Trump’s working-class support also misses one crucial aspect: a majority of the white working class is female, and they began rejecting Trump after the Access Hollywood tape scandal. This overlaps with a remarkable geographic shift in which Democrats are quickly gaining ground in Sunbelt states that were a redoubt of Reagan conservatism, while traditional Democratic strongholds are crumbling in Midwest regions that are older, white and working class.

These groups are huge at a national scale, but fine-grained detail disappears in polls of a thousand respondents. FiveThirtyEight apparently doesn’t include polls that could clarify the picture by zeroing in on groups such as Latino voters, who favor Clinton by an astonishing 48-point gap. Most public polls are marked by shoddier methodology that amplify small swings as opposed to internal campaign polling that show more stability.

Two other significant reasons why FiveThirtyEight overestimates Trump’s chances is early voting and get out the vote. More than 35 million Americans have already voted, which is 28 percent of the total vote in 2012. In nearly every battleground state early voting is outpacing last election, meaning Clinton banked millions of votes when her numbers were peaking. One poll of early voters indicates Clinton is ahead by enough 5 points, which is enough to tack on a 1.3 percent advantage in the final election results.

Many of these factors are evident in Nevada. FiveThirtyEight shows Trump neck and neck with Clinton, but Silver says early voting shows a six-point gap favoring Democratic voters. This discrepancy is consistent with FiveThirtyEight’s failure to predict Harry Reid’s 2010 Senate re-election and its underestimate of Obama’s 2012 victory margin. Six years ago Reid edged out Tea Party kook, Sharron Angle, thanks to an extraordinary turnout machine he’s built after more than 30 years in public office. Nevada also has its own election oracle in reporter John Ralston, who correctly called the two races Silver flubbed. Ralston’s dive into 622,000 votes already cast, which already accounts for 61 percent of 2012 totals, bears grim tidings for Trump even in best-case scenarios.

If Trump loses Nevada, Silver says he wins in only 9 percent of scenarios. That’s a far cry from the 35 percent mark Trump just touched. Trump’s campaign looks to be treating Nevada as a lost cause as he eyes richer electoral prizes like Michigan and Wisconsin that are even further out of his grasp. Even if Trump wins Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Arizona, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, he still loses the election. So he needs to wrestle a Midwestern state away from Clinton.

That’s unlikely as Trump is paying the price for outsourcing get-out-the-vote operations. GOTV is warfare through electoral means and requires a command staff, hundreds of offices, tens of thousands of paid staff and volunteers, and coordination both strategic and minute with the campaign. Trump has none of that. A month before the election, FiveThirtyEight counted 2.5 Clinton field offices for every one of Trump’s. His campaign is also plagued by chaotic websites and offices listed in demolished buildings. Field offices can’t be thrown up like lawn signs, and in battleground states a ground game could add as much as three to five points.

Clinton’s GOTV is robust enough to target strongly Democratic but low-propensity voters. Silver points out polls can’t factor this in. For example, one organization in Florida has dispatched 500 paid canvassers to the field for months to activate a pool of 384,000 Latino voters. Trump is also outmuscled by unions spending hundreds of millions of dollars and deploying thousands of full-time canvassers for Democrats. These efforts are yielding dividends among Latinos in Arizona and Asian-Americans in Nevada. And Michigan’s Arab-American and Muslim-American firewall will easily keep Trump at bay there.

Democrats are hand-wringing over declining African-American turnout, and this has put North Carolina and Ohio in peril, but the surge from women, college-educated, and racial minorities from Virginia to Nevada will offset this deficit. Republicans are already embroiled in civil war, which is damaging Trump in Wisconsin and Utah. Democrats are united and feature a stellar array of surrogates on the hustings, such as the Obamas, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and an A-list of celebrities. Donald Trump has the Pharma Bro, an underwear model, a disgraced baseball star, and a felonious “Real Housewife.”

There is also no evidence of “shy” Trump voters that polls allegedly fail to register. And Trump’s attempts to activate whites who normally don’t vote looks to be a dud as well. An analysis of newly registered and “missing” voters favoring Clinton. Even if there is a hidden upsurge for Trump, it’s unlikely to overcome all these obstacles.

Silver cautions as well that the history of presidential elections and scientific polling is so scanty in terms of data that it’s dicey to draw any broad-based conclusions. For instance, conventional wisdom says as goes Ohio, so goes the nation. But Trump looks set to win Ohio and lose the general election, a first in 14 straight presidential races.

FiveThirtyEight’s model worked fantastically well when the sailing was smooth, but it is foundering in the violent seas of 2016. The Cook Political Report, the brainchild of  the dean of election forecasting, Charles Cook, observes that despite Clinton’s eleventh-hour woes, “The race has tightened to its ‘natural resting place’ with a 2-4 point lead for Clinton,” while Trump’s “path to 270 electoral votes remains decidedly and almost impossibly narrow.”

The best prediction of how the 2016 campaign ends is likelier to be a metaphor than math: Hillary Clinton’s near-collapse at the September 11 memorial where her entire team mobilized to shield her and carry her over the finish line. And no statistical model can predict a moment like that.

Arun Gupta is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York and has written for dozens of publications including the Washington Post, the Nation, The Progressive, Telesur English, and the Guardian. He is the author of the upcoming Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A Junk-Food-Loving Chef’s Inquiry into Taste (The New Press).

Election Night Replay & As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage from FIVE THIRTY EIGHT 8NOV12

ANALYSIS of election night 6NOV12 from Five Thirty Eight. Well done Nate Silver!
The excitement of election night is fading. Although ballots are still being counted, President Obama appears to have carried Florida, the last undecided state, and Republicans are confronting a challenging electoral map.
But for one more dose of election night excitement, here are Nate Silver’s appearances on TimesCast, where he discussed results as they came in with The Times’s Megan Liberman.

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Nate Silver on Election Results

Discussing Obama's Presidential Victory

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/11/07/us/politics/100000001889803/nate-silver-on-election-results.html 

Nate Silver on Obama and Ohio

Focusing on a Swing State and Sandy

• Permanent URL 
• http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/11/06/politics/100000001889614/nate-silver-on-obama-and-ohio.html 

Nate Silver on Election Day

Picking a Presidential Winner

• Permanent URL 
• http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/11/06/us/politics/100000001889356/nate-silver-on-election-day.html 

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/election-night-replay/ 

As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage

By NATE SILVER

Two more presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, will be contested under the current Electoral College configuration, which gave Barack Obama a second term on Tuesday. This year’s results suggest that this could put Republicans at a structural disadvantage.
Based on a preliminary analysis of the returns, Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points on Tuesday to be assured of winning the Electoral College. The last Republican to accomplish that was George H.W. Bush, in 1988. In the table below, I have arranged the 50 states and the District of Columbia from the most Democratic to the most Republican, based on their preliminary results from Tuesday. Along the way, I have counted up the number of electoral votes for the Democratic candidate, starting at zero and going up to 538 as he wins progressively more difficult states.
This process resembles how the FiveThirtyEight tipping-point analysis was calculated. In the simulations we ran each day, we accounted for the range of possible outcomes in each state and then saw which states provided Mr. Obama with his easiest route to 270 electoral votes, the minimum winning number. The state that put Mr. Obama over the top to 270 electoral votes was the tipping-point state in that simulation.

Now that the actual returns are in, we don’t need the simulations or the forecast model. It turned out, in fact, that although the FiveThirtyEight model had a very strong night over all on Tuesday, it was wrong about the identity of the tipping-point state. Based on the polls, it appeared that Ohio was the state most likely to win Mr. Obama his 270th electoral vote. Instead, it was Colorado that provided him with his win – the same state that did so in 2008.
The worry for Republicans is that Mr. Obama won Colorado by nearly five percentage points (4.7 points was his margin there, to the decimal place). In contrast, Mr. Obama’s margin in the national popular vote, as of this writing, is 2.4 percentage points. We estimate that it will grow to 2.5 percentage points once some remaining returns from states like Washington are accounted for, or perhaps slightly higher once provisional ballots in other states are counted. But it seems clear that Mr. Obama had some margin to spare in the Electoral College.
Had the popular vote been a tie – assuming that the margin in each state shifted uniformly – he would still have won re-election with 285 electoral votes, carrying Colorado and Virginia, although losing Florida and Ohio.
In fact, had Mr. Romney won the popular vote by two percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won the Electoral College, losing Virginia but holding onto Colorado.
Of course, the relative order of the states can shift a bit from election to election: in 2000, after all, it was Democrats who lost the Electoral College despite winning the popular vote.
Ohio might be one of the Republicans’ lesser worries. Mr. Obama did win the state, but his margin is 1.9 percentage points based on the ballots in so far, slightly less than his margin of victory nationally, and he may have benefited there from the auto bailout, a one-off event.
But Mr. Obama did not need Ohio to carry the Electoral College, it turned out. Instead, states where there have been demographic shifts, like Colorado, gave him enough of a cushion.
Nor was Ohio the only formerly Republican-leaning state to move closer to the Electoral College tipping point. Mr. Obama’s margins in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina also held up well as compared to 2008.
Virginia, in fact, was incrementally more Democratic-leaning than the country as a whole this year, voting for Mr. Obama by three percentage points.
In Florida, Democrats now seem to have a real advantage with Hispanic voters. Non-Cuban Hispanics there voted for Mr. Obama by roughly the same two-to-one margins that they did in other states, and the Cuban-American vote, long considered Republican-leaning, is now divided about equally between the parties.
Mr. Obama lost North Carolina on Tuesday, but he did so by only about two percentage points. By contrast, in 2000 Al Gore lost North Carolina by 13 points despite winning the national popular vote.
If these states are becoming more Democratic-leaning, which ones are shifting toward Republicans?
Missouri, once a tossup, is now solidly Republican. And West Virginia, which was once Democratic-leaning enough that Michael Dukakis carried it in 1988, voted for Mr. Romney by 27 points on Tuesday.
The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College.
By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them.
The Republican Party will have four years to adapt to the new reality. Republican gains among Hispanic voters could push Colorado and Nevada back toward the tipping point, for example.
States like Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Iowa are overwhelmingly white – but also highly educated, with fairly progressive views on social policy. If Republicans moderated their tone on social issues, they might be more competitive in these states, while regaining ground in Northern Virginia and in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Finally, some of the Democrats’ apparent advantage in the swing states may reflect Mr. Obama’s voter targeting and turnout operations – which were superior, by most accounts, to John McCain’s in 2008 and Mr. Romney’s in 2012.
It is not my job to give advice, but the next Republican nominee might be well served to remember that the party won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote in 2000, when George W. Bush and Karl Rove put more emphasis on the “ground game.” But the Republicans seemed to be at a disadvantage in the last two years when their candidates put less of an investment into it.
If the parties continue down the same paths, however, this won’t be the last election when most of the swing states turn blue.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/as-nation-and-parties-change-republicans-are-at-an-electoral-college-disadvantage/ 

Oct. 31: Obama’s Electoral College ‘Firewall’ Holding in Polls 31OKT12

NATE SILVER always has some fascinating insights on the election predictions and he doesn't disappoint here....

By NATE SILVER

On Oct. 11, this blog posed the question of whether President Obama’s “firewall” in battleground states was all that it was cracked up to be.
At that point, Mr. Obama still technically held the lead in the FiveThirtyEight forecast in enough states to give him 270 electoral votes. But Colorado, Florida and Virginia had turned red in our map, meaning that our forecast suggested that Mitt Romney had better-than-even odds of winning them. Iowa was just on the verge of doing so. And Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just a percentage point or so in Ohio, which would have collapsed his firewall at its foundation.
Theories that the decline in Mr. Obama’s polls that followed the first presidential debate in Denver would somehow skip the swing states were not looking good — as dubious as the idea that tornadoes “skip” houses.
Instead, at that point, Mr. Obama’s position in the FiveThirtyEight forecast had declined for seven consecutive days. If he stopped the bleeding there, he might still be the Electoral College favorite, albeit a narrow one. But it wasn’t clear where the bottom was.
It turned out, however, that the worst was almost over for him. Mr. Obama had one more terrible day in the polls, on Friday, Oct. 12, when Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College rose to almost 40 percent in the forecast. But that was when Mr. Romney’s momentum stopped.
Since then, Mr. Obama’s standing has rebounded slightly. His position in the national polls has stabilized; although the national polls continue to tell a different story about the race than the state polls do; it can no longer be said that they have Mr. Obama behind. (More about that in a moment.)
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.

There were 12 polls published on Wednesday among Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. Mr. Obama held the lead in 11 of the 12 surveys; the exception was a survey by the University of Iowa, which had Mr. Obama down by about one point there, but also had a very small sample size (about 300 likely voters). On average, Mr. Obama led in the polls of these states by 3.9 percentage points.
None of this ought to have been surprising, exactly, if you have been attentive to the polls rather than the pundits. It was a pretty good day of surveys for Mr. Obama but not a great one: for the most part, the polls were coming in close to FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, give or take a modest outlier here and there.
Rather, the polls in these states confirmed what we already knew: that Mr. Obama remains the favorite in the Electoral College.
Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.
But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.
Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast.
Regular readers will have seen the chart below once or twice before. It sorts the competitive states in order of Mr. Obama’s current projected margin of victory or defeat in each one, keeping a running tally of the number of electoral votes that Mr. Obama is accumulating.

Ohio remains the tipping-point state in the forecast, the one that puts him over the top to 270 electoral votes. There, Mr. Obama leads by 2.6 percentage points, which should convert to a victory about 80 percent of the time given the historical accuracy of polls at this late stage of the race.
Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College without Ohio — a prospect we had defended as being plausible before — are looking more tenuous based on the most recent polling.
If Mr. Obama wins Ohio, and all the states above it on the chart, he’d have 281 electoral votes, meaning that he has 11 to spare. That means he could shed New Hampshire from his list, along with either Iowa or Nevada (although not both).
Of these two states, Nevada appears to be the slightly safer one for Mr. Obama; there, Mr. Obama leads by 3.5 percentage points in the forecast, as opposed to 2.9 percentage points in Iowa. The polling has also been somewhat more consistent in Nevada than in Iowa, another factor that the forecast considers in evaluating the probability of an upset.
One fortunate aspect of these two particular states, from Mr. Obama’s view, is that they are not very similar to one another demographically.
Iowa is quite rural. Nevada occupies a huge geographical territory, but its population is very urban, mostly living in Las Vegas and its suburbs.
Iowa is overwhelmingly white, and has a lot of moderate and middle-income, but highly educated, voters. Nevada certainly has an independent streak, but winning there usually depends more upon building a 50 percent coalition among diverse groups and then turning it out to vote. Iowa has a pretty good economy, all things considered; Nevada’s is still terrible.
Since Mr. Obama only needs to carry one of these states, it helps him that they form a diverse portfolio. If Mr. Obama’s turnout operation is strong, then Nevada should be one of the states where he benefits the most. If, instead, Mr. Obama has little “ground game” advantage, but he holds his own among independent and undecided voters, perhaps persuading them that the economy has improved enough to merit his re-election, Iowa may fall for him.
Mr. Romney could also circumvent his need to win Ohio by carrying Wisconsin, but that is looking tough for him. In Ohio, Mr. Romney is behind by two or three percentage points, on average, in the polls. In Wisconsin, Mr. Romney’s better polls have him down by two or three points, while his worst ones have him six to eight points instead. There’s still enough upside to winning Wisconsin that Mr. Romney should not give up on it, in my view, but his chances are down to 12 percent in the forecast, and most of those cases involve outcomes where he has already won Ohio anyway.
The more debatable cases are Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. Mr. Romney is the clear underdog in each one. But his campaign has so much money that it probably doesn’t hurt Mr. Romney much to spend a little bit of it there to maximize whatever residual chances he might have in case the polls are wrong. (Arguably, it was a poor strategic decision for Mr. Romney to make a half-hearted effort to compete in these states.)
Still, for Mr. Romney to win Michigan, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, the polls would have to be much further off than they are in Ohio.
It doesn’t help Mr. Romney, either, that all of these states are in the same part of the country as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, meaning that they are unlikely to leapfrog them and become the tipping-point state on Tuesday. If, hypothetically, Mr. Romney’s polling were a bit better in culturally and geographically disparate states, like Oregon, New Jersey or New Mexico, they might represent better targets.
If Mr. Obama were to lose Ohio (but hold the other states), the tipping-point would then become Colorado. There, Mr. Obama holds a much more tenuous lead, about one percentage point in our forecast, which converts to about a 60 percent chance of winning. But at least it’s a lead rather than a deficit, whereas Mr. Romney’s non-Ohio paths would require him to win states where he is now three or four percentage points behind.
Mr. Obama also remains about a 60 percent favorite in Virginia. Another option would be Florida, although it is a resource-intensive state and we give him about a 40 percent chance of winning there.
While state polls dominated the news on Wednesday, there were also a handful of national polls out, even as others have been suspended in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

On average, Mr. Obama led by just over one percentage point in these national polls, although it is an odd distribution, with two polls showing him up by four or five points, several showing a tied race, and one (the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll) putting him two points down.
The FiveThirtyEight model calculates a national poll average, using a more sophisticated method than the simple average I’ve taken in the chart. (The model doesn’t “forget” about the Gallup poll, for example, just because it has been suspended for a couple of days.)
We don’t usually print this number, because it would sow confusion: our estimate of the national popular vote, which we do publish, instead represents a combination of national polls and the implied standing of the candidates based on state polls.
But, for what it’s worth, our national poll average shows Mr. Obama up by about half a percentage point right now. This is within the range of other Web sites: Real Clear Politics has an exactly tied race in its national poll average; HuffPost Pollster has Mr. Obama down by three-tenths of a point; Talking Points Memo has Mr. Obama ahead by about one percentage point.
Again: we don’t take the average of the national polls to be tantamount to a forecast of the national popular vote, since state polls, if considered carefully, can provide considerable information about the national race as well.
Suppose, however, that Mr. Obama were to tie Mr. Romney in the popular vote on Tuesday. The way that the forecast model works, this would require subtracting some from Mr. Obama in each state in order for the arithmetic to add up.
Even under these conditions, Mr. Obama would still be a favorite in the forecast. In fact, he’d be about a 70 percent favorite to win the Electoral College conditional upon the national popular vote being tied, according to our simulations.
A tie in the national popular vote is a tolerable condition for Mr. Obama, in other words. His position is robust enough in states like Ohio that he has some slack. With a lead of about 2.5 percentage points in the tipping-point states, Mr. Obama could underperform his state polls by a point or two and still win.
Conversely, Mr. Romney has few chances to win unless the state polls are systematically wrong.
I don’t mean for this to sound dismissive; the polling error could quite easily be correlated across the different states, and the national polls are one reason to be suspicious of the state polls.
But we’re at the point now where Mr. Obama may be a modest favorite even if the national polls are right. Two weeks ago, when Mr. Obama appeared to trail Mr. Romney by a point or so in the national polls, that would not have been the case.
Is it possible that Mr. Obama has benefited, politically, from his handling of Hurricane Sandy? He has gotten high marks for it so far, according to the tracking poll run by The Washington Post and ABC News.
Our database contains roughly a dozen polls that conducted the bulk of their interviews on Tuesday or Wednesday, after Hurricane Sandy became the dominant news story. Most of these are state polls, and most were conducted in states that were isolated from the major effects of the storm.
Our analysis of the trend lines in the polls suggest that they have been a somewhat above-average group for Mr. Obama, perhaps suggesting a percentage point or so of improvement for him.
The model is not yet pricing in very much of this into its forecast, as trends like that can occur fairly easily because of statistical noise. But if the storm has a discernible effect in the polls, it seems more likely to help Mr. Obama than to hurt him based on what we’ve seen so far.
This is something to monitor as more national polls come back online. I think describing the race as a “toss-up” reflects an uninformed interpretation of the evidence, but there is surely room to debate how much of a favorite Mr. Obama is. However, Mr. Romney is not in a position to tolerate any movement in Mr. Obama’s favor given how close we are to the finish line.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/oct-31-obamas-electoral-college-firewall-holding-in-polls/