Nate Silver: Obama The Clear Favorite, But We Could Be Surprised

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Which pollsters do you think have most accurately captured the state of the race to this point?

I think pollsters can do more things that are wrong than right. I’ve become more of a traditionalist when it comes to polling, in part because we’ve seen more of a split between what some of the more traditionally thorough polls say and what some of the automated and robopolls say. If you get numbers published by NBC and the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post and ABC News, those are pretty good. Even within the range of the high quality pollsters, you have a spread between basically a tie and a rather overwhelming, 2008-style Obama lead. That’s kind of normal. If you go back through history and see what the polling spread is like at any given time, you often will see a 5- or 7- or even 10-point gap between one poll and another.

Has Obama been the favorite for longer than journalists and pundits have been writing and saying he is?

For some reason, the conventional wisdom went from, “Oh, it’s a tossup” to “Oh, Obama’s way ahead or a clear favorite.” I tend to see it more in shades of distinction. When we launched our forecast in June, we had him as a 60-40 favorite. The race didn’t move all that far from that number. One thing people maybe don’t grasp as a very basic thing is the more time runs off the clock, the more holding a narrow advantage is likely to hold up. If you were making an assessment of what Obama’s chances were in the spring, then you have to worry about a blowup in Europe, you have to worry about something happening in the Middle East — maybe it still will in the Middle East. Maybe instead of having merely mediocre jobs numbers, actually going back into a recession. There are all these shoes that can drop on you and they haven’t.

You were seeing the same range of about a 2-, 2.5-, 3-point lead very, very consistently until the conventions, really, where the first really bad signal for Romney was that he got very little convention bounce. And historically, if you don’t pull ahead in the polls after your own convention, then you don’t win. It looks like he maybe pulled into a tie, but probably not much more than that. That was bad piece of news No. 1. And then the theory was, maybe conventions don’t produce a bounce anymore. And then Obama got a decent sized one — not great, it’s actually fairly small by historical standards. But the fact is, it’s almost pure gain for him because Romney didn’t really eat into Obama’s numbers at all. If you go from having a 2-point lead to a 4-point lead, that’s one thing, and that’s pretty meaningful. Also the fact that conventions start in late August to now, a month has gone by, you’ve eaten up almost a third of the time remaining until the election. All of a sudden it’s kind of like, well Romney has a shot here, but we’re looking for him to really win the debates or October surprises or this convention bounce peters out. We’ve had Obama’s odds going from 60 percent to 70 percent over the summer, and then from 70 percent to closer to 80 percent now. I’m not sure what the exact threshold is, when’s it a tossup and when’s it likely Obama?

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