Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A Tale of Two Electorates

The national horse race polls show Romney up an average of a point or so, while the state polls show Obama winning the key swing states.

The question from my elder son Matt this weekend was "How can both be right?"  He argued at length that there simply weren't enough votes to push toward Romney without changing the result in any of the larger states.

Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics.com's excellent numbers guy, turns to that question this morning.  He visits all the issues on polling you can imagine -- relative credibility of those doing the national polling vs. that of those doing the State polls, for example -- and then takes the approach of constructing a national poll based on the entire set of available State polls and using the relative state turnout in 2008.  His national-from-state poll shows Romney trailing by a point or so, not leading.  So Matt's off-the-cuff analysis was clearly correct.

That's not what the national likely voter polls show, so the puzzle remains.

One thought is that the RCP national poll average is heavily weighted by the magnitude of the samples in the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls, so that the question comes down to the relative accuracy of those polling organizations vs. that of the organizations doing the state polling, and of their model of the electorate.

Gallup, of course, doesn't do state-by-state polls, but Rasmussen does, so had I the time -- I don't since I'm running my own campaign for Sandoval County Commission -- I'd run Trende's analysis on Rasmussen's data state data sets.

I'd like to think Romney will win the national vote by a couple and the electoral college by taking North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for a total of 279 electoral votes.  But there is little evidence that Romney is closing the gap in the RealClearPolitics average in Ohio fast enough to win there next Tuesday.  Or that he's closer even in the Rasmussen polls.

All we can do is wait and see what next Tuesday brings.