The big day is finally upon us, and while most signs are pointing to a very narrow popular-vote and perhaps more comfortable electoral-vote win for the president (along with small enough Democratic House and Republican Senate gains to maintain the congressional status quo), the polls and the intangibles are uncertain enough to maintain some sense of suspense.
After a week or so of favoring Romney, national polls have been slowly moving back towards Obama during the last few days. The RealClearPolitics “poll of polls” has Obama up by 0.5%; TPM’s average is at 0.7%. No major national poll—not even Rasmussen—has shown Romney with a lead going down the stretch, though the final Gallup Tracking poll (suspended last week because of the impact of Sandy on response-levels) today could change that. The final Pew survey showing Obama up by 3% is getting a lot of attention because it’s the polling firm that was the first to show a “Romney surge” after the Denver debate.
But it’s the electoral college estimates that are most favorable for Obama, reflecting polls consistently showing him ahead in Ohio, Iowa and Nevada, a combination that along with less competitive “blue states” would give him the presidency. It’s also less clear than it seemed to be last week that Romney has actually pulled ahead in Virginia and Florida, and despite a few outlier polls showing him within striking distance in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the consensus is that barring some surprise turnout disparities, those states will fall to Obama as well. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight rates the probability of an Obama electoral college win at 85%, and Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium at 98%. The conventional wisdom (though not among most Republicans!) is that Obama is in much the same position as George W. Bush was in 2004, with job approval ratings at or just above 50%, and a very small undecided vote.
At a more strategic level, it seems that Obama’s particular lines of attack against Romney in the months leading up to the conventions “stuck” in the Midwest, and especially the supersaturated (with ads, campaign contacts, and candidate appearances) state of Ohio, more than in the rest of the country, propping up Obama’s share of the white vote at around or even above 40%.
The final mystery, of course, involves the two candidates’ turnout efforts. Since it is universally believed that Obama had a huge advantage in GOTV in 2008, and his campaign invested a reported billion dollars in this year’s effort, it’s a bit of a stretch to believe that Republicans will actually have an advantage of their own. Though national polls after the Denver debate were briefly showing a revived “enthusiasm gap” favoring Romney, that’s subsided, and in any event, that’s cooked into the cake of polls showing Obama ahead among likely voters (his lead among all registered voters is typically higher: 7 points in the final Pew poll, for example). Various efforts to figure out GOTV effectiveness from early voting numbers are inherently flawed (it almost entirely depends on whether early voters for each side are or are not “low-propensity voters, which is very difficult to discern). For what it’s worth, it appears Obama is leading significantly among early voters in the three battleground states where he has been consistently leading (Iowa, Nevada and Ohio), while Romney’s doing relatively well in Colorado, Florida and North Carolina. Two battleground states, New Hampshire and Virginia, have restrictive laws that make early voting less significant. And in Florida and Ohio, the overall importance of early voting is clouded by its restricted availability this year at the direction of Republican elected officials (in Ohio litigation over all sorts of voting rules will continue through election day).
While it’s business-as-usual that both campaigns continue to insist they are going to win, perhaps by a comfortable margin, it’s worth paying attention to the intensity of the spin in the event of an election so close (in either popular or electoral votes) that the results are contested legally. With the 2000 precedent keeping Democratic suspicions of skullduggery high, and after years of conservative agitation about “voter fraud” and the “Chicago machine”—not to mention claims about the general illegitimacy of the Obama presidency—adverse results will not be lightly accepted by either side. If the race comes down to Ohio, as it did in 2004, the state’s slow timetable for—and heavily disputed rules governing—the counting of provisional ballots could extend the contest for weeks.
Down-ballot the odds of a Republican Senate takeover continue to shrink, with its candidates in Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri all getting bad news from the pollsters this last week. Nate Silver gives Democrats a 91.5% probability of hanging onto their majority. Larry Sabato is predicting no Republican gains at all. It would probably take an unforeseen Republican “wave” to upset these projections.
Nor do Democrats have a realistic chance of taking back the House (again, barring some GOTV-driven “wave,” which would probably only extend to presidential battleground states). The authoritative Cook Political Report estimates the most likely outcome is a 5 seat Democratic gain. With only three of the eleven governorships (all in states certain to go heavily for Romney) at stake on Tuesday in Republican hands, the GOP is in good shape to make gains (five currently Democratic governorships have competitive races according to Cook). Democrats will likely make gains in state legislative seats given the 2010 GOP landslide, but beware of raw numbers given the great disparity in the number of districts among states (the lower chamber in New Hampshire has 400 members, as compared to 80 in California).
There are 188 measures (mostly initiatives and referenda) on the ballot in 39 states, involving issues ranging from same-sex marriage (Maine, Maryland and Minnesota) to charter schools (Georgia and Virginia) to marijuana (Montana and Oregon). As usual, California has the ballot initiatives producing the most noise and highest spending. Gov. Jerry Brown’s Prop 30, temporarily increasing sales and high-end income taxes to provide funding for education, could go either way; a defeat would produce the biggest state budget crisis yet.
In general, no one should be yawning going into November 6.
