by Denis Campbell

Had you placed an Obama to win bet in February you would have gotten much better odds than today. Now the long-shot bet is McCain since he has only a 3% chance of winning. The Sunday polls are crunched by über statistical wonk Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com’s. As of this moment he predicts 350 Electoral Votes for Barack Obama and 187 for John McCain. Obama has a 96.7% win chance vs. 3.3% for McCain. Even the popular vote total sits are 52.3% to 46.3% for Obama.

Nate, a baseball lover and mathematical statistician wonk loves to develop metrics and tools with which look underneath numbers of all kinds. He has lots of experience and developed statistical measuring tools in the world of baseball that nearly every front office uses to evaluate personnel, free agents and trades. He correctly predicted this year that the Philadelphia Phillies and Tampa Bay Rays (much to my chagrin) would go deep into baseball’s playoffs but alas Chicago’s Cubbies would once again disappoint their legions of fans. 

The mathematics also seem to work in tracking political races. He got the primary battles right, more and more news organisations take his numbers very seriously (sort of the like the American football BCS formulae used to determine the nation’s top teams across conference lines on steroids). 

Here is his take on Sunday’s round of polling results…

While there are a few surprises here and there, once again the theme of today’s polls is stability in the race for the White House.

John McCain narrowed his gap significantly in today’s Zogby tracking poll, drawing from 9.5 points behind to 5.3. As you probably know, I have a significant critique of Zogby’s weighting mechanism, which assumes that the partisan identification breakdown will be roughly equal to 2004, when about the same number of Democrats and Republicans turned out for the election. 

Neverthless, McCain also improved slightly in the Research 2000, IBD/TIPP and ABC/Post polls. On the other hand, Barack Obama gained a point in Hotline and the Gallup “Likely Voters II” model (though not Gallup’s “traditional” likely voter model), and remains at his high-water mark in Rasmussen. 

If the balance of today’s national polls contain better news for McCain, the balance of the state polls show Obama continuing to perform very well in several swing states. Obama now has 15-point lead in New Hampshire according to the Boston Globe / UNH poll, which had generally contained good news for McCain earlier in this cycle. PPP puts Obama up by 9 in Virginia, while two new polls also show him with significant leads in Iowa.

Meanwhile, an Arizona poll for the Democratic strategy firm Project New West shows John McCain ahead by just 4 points there, and a couple of other polls showing a close race in McCain’s home state are apparently on the way. In terms of our model, the principal effect of the Arizona polls is really not on the Grand Canyon State itself, where our model remains skeptical of an Obama upset, but rather in terms of its neighbor New Mexico, where it is now (even) more optimistic about Obama’s chances.
Counteracting the Obama trend slightly are new polls in Wisconsin and Missouri, which show somewhat better numbers for McCain than other recent polls of those states. However, that is not enough to prevent McCain’s win percentage from drifting downward to 3.3 percent.

So nothing much has changed, Obama holds his lead. The desperate search for Bin Laden goes on with the US bombing Syria yesterday. So cynical towards Republicans have we become that even proof they got him would not be enough to swing this election for McCain. Early voting remains key.

Poll Sources Nate Silver crunches…
Pollsters and Poll Compilations
ARG 
Election Inspection 
Election Projection 
Electoral-Vote.com 
Gallup 
Google News 
Political Wire 
Polling Report 
Pollster.com 
PresidentElectionPolls.com 
Public Policy Polling 
Quinnipiac 
Rasmussen 
Real Clear Politics 
SurveyUSA 
Swing State Proect 
The Page / Halperin
TPM Poll Tracker 
Wikipedia 

Other Resources
2004 Exit Polls 
2004 Vote by CD 
American Fact Finder 
ARDA (data on religion) 
Dem Con Watch 
Factcheck.org 
FEC (fundraising) 
IEM (futures) 
Intrade (futures) 
Leip’s Election Atlas 
Nat’l Council on Public Polls 
Pew Research Center 
Strange Maps 
The Green Papers 
USA QuickFacts 
WaPo Candidate Tracker