Most polls suggest Obama has the race sewn up, but are the polls right?
A baseball stats guy turned political analyst (and a Chicagoan, to boot) has a great site that helps neophytes pick apart the polls. Nate Silver invented a system for forecasting the performance of professional baseball players. He's now using those skills to assess the quality of political polls and predict who will win on Tuesday.
On his blog, Silver posts individual polls plus a prediction, updated daily, on who will prevail no Election Day. That prediction is based on aggregating individual polls, with more weight given to more accurate and more recent polls, demographic information and a bunch of other statistical mumbo-jumbo I can't explain.
As of Nov 3, Silver site predicts Obama winning with 51.5 percent of the popular vote and 340.2 of the electoral vote (you need 270 to win). Silver will be analyzing the real results as they come in Tuesday.
Check it out at: www.fivethirtyeight.com
(538, by the way, is the number of electors in the electoral college).
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Just goes to show that perhaps 51% of all Americans are as uninformed and starstruck as the media hoped they would be. Perhaps ignorance is the primary American virtue in these troubled times. It may be hard to breath with one's head in the sand, but the view never changes, eh?
Obama will win and not much will change. Some few fools will think it is payback time. Most of us will continue living with our daily struggles. The economy is in the tank and it will get worse before it gets better.
Jimi, the rest, 49% of American need to stop watching Fox News. That includes you, Jimi.