Hi. It's 7am here on the Pacific coast. I've analyzed the available polling for the past week in each of the swing states. If the method I developed works (for all the reasons it might or might not listed in this post), here's what it looks like the results will be:
Obama: 353 electoral votes
McCain: 185 electoral votes
My method actually isn't good at predicting ND (3 EV's, there weren't enough recent polls), so I could be off by 3.
Here is my breakdown on who wins which swing states:
Obama:
NC
FL
VA
PA
OH
NH
OH
IA
CO
NM
NV
McCain:
GA
IN
MO (this is the closest race)
MT
and like I said, ND has insufficient data.
It's worth reiterating that this predictive model is only as good as the polling data (and the manipulation/weighting the pollsters do to adjust the data). It will actually be interesting if this method does not work this year, because it worked perfectly to predict the winner of each state in 2004 (though not the margin of win).
Given the problems that surfaced in the Democratic primaries (noted here and here), it's not at all clear that current polling methods are effective at getting to the entire electorate. Rural minorities seems to be especially undercounted. And by now, I'm guessing everyone has heard about the cell-phone-user-only undercount, as well as the so-called "Bradley effect" - which many have recently discounted, but as we saw in the primaries, it was incontrovertible (I think) that certain white voters seemed to prefer Hillary Clinton to such a degree that you could not help but think that race had something to do with it. There was also recently the fascinatingly complex poll that estimated that Obama would likely lose 6% of his potential vote due to racial bias.
UPDATE: well, obviously, the system worked. Except for IN. Nobody got that right. Interesting to consider why....
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