October 19, 2012

President '12

Gallup's First Fully Post-Vice-Presidential Debate Survey Says...

Carroll Andrew Morse

Gallup's 7-day tracking polls now include only the time period after last week's Vice-Presidential debate (October 12th to October 18th). According to their likely voter results, Mitt Romney has a 51-45 lead over Barack Obama, up from the 48-47 lead that Romney held in the results that ended with the day before the debate.

Romney's lead in the likely voter result is down one point from his 52-45 lead from yesterday, which could be related to changes from Tuesday night's Presidential debate beginning to enter the sample.

Registered voter results show a similar trend, with Obama having held a 48-46 lead on the day before the Vice-Presidential debate, while Romney holds a 48-47 lead as of today.

UPDATE:

Nate Silver of the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog points out that Gallup's likely voter results are an outlier (h/t Jason Becker)...

[I]ts results are deeply inconsistent with the results that other polling firms are showing in the presidential race, and the Gallup poll has a history of performing very poorly when that is the case.

Other national polls show a race that is roughly tied on average...

Silver's popular vote forecast model shows the race at it's tightest on the day after the Vice-Presidential debate (Obama 49.8-49.1), with Obama gaining some slight momentum since then.

I also checked the RealClearPolitics daily poll average, which I believe is a not-very scientific averaging of poll results. It shows the same basic trend around the Vice-Presidential debate as Silver's model, with Romney having had his maximum advantage over Obama right around the Vice-Presidential debate, then a decline a few days afterward. RCP's "average" now has Obama up by a tenth of a percentage point; Silver's model has Obama up by 1.5.

In a related development, I just remembered why I stopped writing horserace prognostication posts!

1:28 PM | TrackBack (0)
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Too many variables to predict why the electorate is inexorably moving towards Romney. Personally I think the attention span of the average voter is in play. It's easy to be cool and like Obama a month out, but reality comes into the equation three weeks out. The economy is the issue--and Romney will become more and more a frontrunner as independents stop dithering and women understand that, per Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a job (food and shelter) are more important that free birth control. This brought to you, as the next president said, by the letter O and 16T in debt....

Posted by: Mike at October 19, 2012 6:40 PM

"I just remembered why I stopped writing horserace prognostication posts!"

Oh but it's fun!


"and women understand that, per Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a job (food and shelter) are more important that free birth control."

Shhh. We don't want the Obama/Biden campaign to figure that out before November 6.

Posted by: Monique at October 19, 2012 8:32 PM

My prediction:
Obama wins electoral but not the popular vote. It will be a repeat of Bush in 2000.

Posted by: Jim Jebow at October 20, 2012 10:39 AM

What odds would you give for your prediction against the field? I might be tempted to take that action (for entertainment purposes only, of course).

Posted by: Andrew at October 20, 2012 12:23 PM
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