Two readers with usually-different perspectives wrote in with similar takes. The first:
Look at what the pollsters said about those already voted..
Fox – Obama up 1%..
Zogby – Obama up 16%
Hotline – Obama up 5%
Pew – Obama up 18%
Gallup – Obama up 10%
So the range is between 1% and 18%… Thanks, guys.
Take the mean, you get about 10% edge for Obama.. I would think all those new voters, the young and the African-Americans would want to rush and do the early vote..
According to the demographic data we have, that’s at least partially correct – African-Americans made up a huge share of the early votes at first, and their share has steadily decreased as more early votes came in. He continues:
…If 10 percent is all they can muster, how likely are we to have double digit race tomorrow?
If 10 percent is it, and 65-70 percent of the electorate will vote tomorrow – and I think it is very likely to be a tie, assuming the GOPers do come out…then the whole race will become a 3.5 percent race..
Suppose Obama wins by 3.5 percent…about the same edge as GWB in 2004…what does it say about the election considering the headwinds blowing against the GOP?
And this, from one of my best readers at throwing cold water on any optimistic scenario:
Most of the state polls from PPP, Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, etc today show Missouri, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina all essentially tied and dependent purely on turnout. It’s pretty clear Obama is going to win the national popular vote (he’s winning states like New York with 60 percent of the vote), but his electoral college margin could be very small, depending on how those large states go. Obama could win them all, split them, or lose them all.
The issue is that Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Iowa etc all look very strong for Obama, and that’s the key to him winning the electoral vote. However, McCain may be able to put up a decent electoral vote performance.
Later tonight I’ll have the state-by-state rundown, but this is more or less the neighborhood of my assessment right now. I would have preferred to see some better numbers in today’s polling (more on that later).
A lot of pollsters have made their bets that the electorate of 2008 is going to be wildly different than the one of 2004 or even 2006. If they’re right, we’re looking at the Obama-wins-big scenario. But they may be wrong. Gallup’s final poll puts the Democrats party ID advantage will be 12 percent. The most it has been since 1980 was 4 percent, in 1996. It was 3 percent in 2006.
There are very few swing states where you can say, “no, no way McCain wins that.” The problem is the sheer number of swing states he needs to win…