Month: November 2012

This is the third and final part of my three-part polling post-mortem. Part I here looks at the national and state polls, and Part II at the likely voter screens and the electorate.
V. Polls vs. Non-Poll Tools
One of my premises in reviewing projections of turnout was that other items of information besides the polls were worth reviewing. Many of these same indicators favoring Romney in 2012 had forecast the rise of Obama in 2008. Why did so many of them prove useless or misleading?
The Bush era saw a modern-historic rise in the partisan component of the electorate, i.e., the percentage of votes that were either Democrats voting Democrat or Republicans voting Republican – and while the partisan component has become more Democratic, the trend has not significantly abated under Obama:

As long as that remains the case, knowing the partisan composition of the electorate remains critical. Yet non-poll data on the topic proved elusive. The data point I stressed that failed most spectacularly was the Rasmussen and Gallup surveys of party ID. I don’t regret looking at those; they had a proven track record in the past of being right, and I like looking at data that has a proven track record in the past of being right. Rasmussen’s surveys had been right in presidential and non-presidential election years, in years before and during/after the rise of Obama, and had never before overstated GOP turnout. And the Rasmussen survey in particular is based on an enormous sample of something like 15,000 interviews a month. But both proved to be way off the mark: Gallup had the electorate at R+1, Rasmussen’s final survey R+6. Despite their record of accuracy before 2012, I will almost certainly put no stock in those surveys again. It really was different this time.
On the other hand, I still stand by my scorn for TPM’s party ID survey average; it was useless slop that failed once again. It got 2010 wrong, and 2012 too: even if you adjust the numbers upward proportionally from the 90.7% of the population it purported to survey, it projects a D+8 electorate of D 36/R 28/I 36, when the exits told us it was D 38/R 32/I 30. The survey assumed significantly more independent voters than Republican voters, but Republicans outnumbered independents at the polls, just as they have every year since 1980.
That said, as in 2008 and unlike in the off-year electorate of 2010, Republicans were at a recent-historically low share of the vote relative to independents, suggesting that their turnout problem was not solely one of high Democratic turnout – this chart computes the GOP share of (Republicans+Independents), and the Democratic share of (Democrats+Independents), so as to avoid letting one party’s turnout cloud estimates of the other’s:

No two ways about it: there were not enough Republicans at the polls. The question for the GOP going forward is how to bring the people who stayed home or left the party back into the fold and the voting booth.
Then there’s voter registrations; I relied on a bunch of studies showing that Democrats were registering new voters at a slower rate than 2008 and suffering a net decline in voter registration in key battleground states, while Republican registrations were up slightly and independent registrations were up dramatically. This hard data told the same story as the national party ID surveys and the voter enthusiasm self-reporting. While Democrats said they could just turn out the voters they’d registered in 2008, I was skeptical on two grounds: voters age 22-25 were likely to have moved since 2008, and voters age 18-21 could not have been registered then.
I may have overrated these problems. It would seem that OFA’s digital outreach must have kept a handle on transient recent college grads. And we have yet to see final voter-registration figures; while 2008 featured yearlong registration drives, it’s still possible that the Obama campaign just registered a whole lot of people in October and/or the day they voted. I’ll be very surprised if we do not see, in the data that comes out after the fact, a surge in last-minute registrations.
There was also early voting and absentee ballot data; I didn’t have systematic data, but lots and lots of the individual hard-data points, especially from Colorado and Ohio, showed that early voting and absentee ballot requests were up in Republican areas or among registered Republicans, and down with Democrats, at least compared to 2008. Many of these data points came from official state records; they were not just the usual vaporous campaign emissions about how many doors they knocked on. Yet again, all this data turned out to be misleading. For example, the Colorado Secretary of State at one point was showing an R+2 electorate in the state after 62% of the state had voted early. Coming from official records, that seemed to me a non-crazy reason to think the electorate would be pretty good for the GOP, given that early voting is more of a Democratic strength in most states. Exit polls showed the Colorado electorate ended up D+4.
Relatedly, one of the realities the GOP has to come to grips with is the extent to which early voting has changed both the process of turning out voters and the process of polling even as compared to a decade ago – early voting makes it easier to turn out less-motivated voters, but also harder to use traditional tools to figure out who will turn out. Many of the polls in October hugely oversampled early voters (you’d get samples that were around 40% early voters when about 20% of the state, according to official records, had voted early) – but of course, with voter turnout overall below 60% of the voting-age population, you probably do need to oversample people who you now know are 100% certain to vote, if your sample is going to reflect final turnout. I suspect that at least in some states, the polls taking a turn towards Obama at the end reflected, not a change in public opinion, but a change in the poll samples as more of Obama’s early vote got locked in. That suggests that past patterns in how the polls moved at the end of a race in the days before early voting may be a poor guide to how they will move in years to come.
Another indicator I factored in, from within the polls, was polls of self-reported voter enthusiasm. Many, many polls reported GOP voters more enthusiastic about voting. Such polls have been indicative of an “enthusiasm gap” borne out on Election Day in the past, including in 2010; they were not this time. Ditto the less scientific indicator of the large, enthusiastic crowds Romney and Ryan drew on the trail. By contrast, one thing I didn’t put a ton of stock in, small-dollar donations, favored Obama, and in retrospect it was probably a sign of the effectiveness of his digital outreach (the much-mocked three-a-day fundraising emails), and a proxy for real base enthusiasm just as it had been for Bush in 2004. Romney never really did particularly well with small donors.
I also failed to consider that Dick Morris predicted a Romney win, which should have set the probability of a Romney win to zero all by itself.
All of which does make me wonder whether, despite my longstanding philosophy of wanting to use external sources as a sanity check on the polls, there are any left we can trust. If relative or in some cases absolute advantages in voter registration, early voting, absentee balloting, party identification, and self-reported voter enthusiasm are not worth anything, we may be stuck trusting the pollsters’ hunches – and may be blindsided the next time they are wrong.
VI. Presidential vs. Off Year Polling
Many of us quite reasonably thought that 2010 proved the GOP had recovered from its 2006 and 2008 wipeouts, and that we should expect an electorate in 2012 that looked at least as much like 2010 as like 2008; at a minimum, a midway point between the two, which would be D+3.5. After all, 2010 was the more recent sample, and both parties had contested it vigorously. But one of the real emerging lessons of 2012 is that we are in an age where turnout in mid-term elections is genuinely not predictive of the electorate that will show up in a presidential election, and vice versa. As with many things in the Age of Obama, it remains to be seen if this effect will persist after Obama is gone – but it is clearly with us now, and suggests both that (1) Democrats on the ballot in 2014 should not count on the 2012 electorate showing up and (2) even a strongly Republican-tilted electorate in 2014, if one resurfaces, will not tell us much about the 2016 electorate. Right now, I would not want to be Mark Warner facing the electorate that voted in Bob McDonnell by 19 points, or Ron Johnson facing the electorate that re-upped Obama by 7.
This chart shows each party’s swing between the off year elections and the prior and subsequent general election:

As you can see, Republican turnout in the era from 1984 to 2000 was extremely steady every two years, in both general and off-year elections, around 35% of the vote. Democrats would go up and down relative to independents, but the GOP share was a constant. But since 2000, that has fluctuated much more wildly, with high GOP turnout in the 2002, 2004 and 2010 elections and low turnout in 2006, 2008 and 2012. That volatility is even higher than the volatility of the Democrats. What it suggests is, more or less, that there are a lot more casual Democratic voters than casual Republican voters – the GOP’s determined base turns out rain or shine every two years except in a real washout like 2006, but the extra people who come out only every four years are (at present) composed more heavily of Democrats. That’s terrible news if you’re a Democratic candidate for Senator or Governor in 2014 (even aside from the usual carnage that attends a president’s sixth-year elections), but it’s also frightening news for Republicans considering the long-term strength of the party.
VII. Models vs. Averages
My criticism, and that of other informed skeptics on the Right, of Nate Silver’s 538 model was on three grounds. First, most of the major controversies in this election cycle centered around how much faith to place in the state polling averages, a debate for now largely resolved in favor of the state polling averages. Since the 538 model runs on those averages, it successfully called the election – but so did the averages themselves, without the assistance of the model.
Second, the model has been oversold. This really has nothing to do with the model itself, and everything to do with making people understand that it was only as good as its inputs. That criticism still stands: as noted in Part II, the polls had to make some very unscientific adjustments to keep up with the electorate this year, and there are significant reasons to question their ability to do so in the future. If the pollsters’ “hunches” are wrong next time, the model contains no mechanism to avoid failing just as it has failed in virtually every past instance where the state polls were wrong. If you view the 538 model as a way of aggregating imperfect inputs – like the RCP average, but with some additional bells and whistles – you can get value from it as an informed consumer. If you view it as an infallible Oracle to be obeyed, you are likely to sooner or later be disappointed.
Third, the most questionable part of the model is its projections of the likelihood of how late-deciding voters will break, which by definition is the part not anchored to the polls. (You can read Nate Silver’s breakdown of past incumbent-challenger races here, and while as he notes it suffers from the usual small-sample-size problems of any presidential poll analysis, you can also see that the challenger has traditionally tended to gain more ground than the incumbent as compared to his standing in the October polls). This is an area where others in this field have done more work than I have, so I won’t repeat the controversies, but one of my prior concerns was Ted Frank’s point that the 538 model was placing heavy emphasis on the 2000 election in projecting that voters were less likely to break against an incumbent party when the Democrats are in office than the Republicans. Ted’s point was that Bush’s DUI story was an unusual end-of-race event not likely to recur here (I had a good deal of confidence that Mitt Romney had never been busted for DUI). But we did, yet again, have an end-of-the-race late-October surprise, in the form of Hurricane Sandy, and we did, yet again, have voters break towards Obama right at the end. Unless you place a lot of value on the ability of the media to spin a late-breaking story in the Democrats’ favor, however (not a factor in Bush’s case, since the story was self-explanatory), it’s hard to see how you build a credible mathematical model that assumes this sort of thing will happen with regularity.
The model’s usefulness in presidential polling is also not necessarily translatable to other races, especially in off-years when the electorate is not as predictable. There was no running 538 forecast this year, at all, for the Democrats’ chances of re-taking the House (which they did not). In 2010, the 538 forecast in August 2010 gave Republicans only around a 60 percent chance of taking the House, and still had Democrats with about a 20% chance of holding their House majority as late as Election Day – a much higher chance than the model gave Romney of winning this year. But of course, the Democrats got shellacked in a landslide, far worse by historic House standards than Romney’s loss by historic presidential standards.
As to the parts of the 538 model that go beyond just plugging in the state poll averages, I continue to take Bill James’ view of expert and expertise:

“[G]etting the answers right” had almost nothing to do with the success of my career. My reputation is based entirely on finding the right questions to ask – that is, in finding questions that have objective answers, but to which no one happens to know what the objective answer is…When I do that, it makes almost no difference whether I get the answer right, or whether I get it a little bit wrong. Of course I do my very best to get the answers right, out of pride and caution, but it doesn’t actually matter.
Why?
Because if I don’t get the answer right, somebody else will. It is called “science.”
…[T]he scientific method has been the greatest ally of my career. Basically, what I know about the scientific method would fit onto a bumper sticker, and, that being the case, I might as well read you the bumper sticker. We design tests to see whether an assertion is compatible or incompatible with the evidence. When you do that, someone else will always figure out some way to do another test, and a better test. When that happens, it is my responsibility to acknowledge that the other person’s research is better than mine or is an advancement from mine. What is necessary to the advancement of knowledge, then, is humility – the capacity to recognize that other people have accomplished something that I have not been able to accomplish. That, then, is the bumper sticker: what is necessary to the advancement of knowledge is humility.
When you go to an expert and you say that, “I don’t think that what you are saying is true,” that will be perceived as arrogance. Who are you to challenge the experts? But it is not arrogance, at all; it is grounded in the understanding that we are all floating in a vast sea of ignorance, and that much of what we all believe to be true will later be shown to be nonsense. To recognize this is not arrogance; it is humility.
When I was in Elementary School in the early 1960s, our principal was fond of telling us that, when he was a young man just after World War One, he took a college chemistry class, in which the professor told the students that they were studying science at the ideal time, because all of the important discoveries had been made now. Everything that there was to be known about chemistry or biology or physics, he suggested, was pretty much known now.

I add to that my own prior view of experts:

[T]he expert who learns that the recitation of jargon and the appeal to authority effectively exempts him from moral or social scrutiny has made the most dangerous discovery known to man: the ability to get away with virtually anything. Because if people will let you talk your way into money and influence with good science on the grounds that they do not understand it or have no right to obstruct it, what is to stop the expert from using bad science from accomplishing the same end, if they layman isn’t equipped to tell the difference between the two?

We have not arrived now at the End of History or the End of Science. The polling controversies of past election cycles forced pollsters and poll analysts to learn important lessons. The polling controversies of this election cycle have, in my view, done the same. I wish my conclusions had carried the day this time, but I make no apology for challenging assumptions that were being treated as Holy Writ by liberals merely because, on this occasion, those assumptions proved correct. That’s what I often do in my day job as a lawyer, in which I often encounter two contending experts with irreconcilable conclusions: probe their competing assumptions to expose what each side’s conclusions assume to be true. There will always be a role for a Socrates, asking well-compensated analysts and pundits to explain themselves and put their assumptions on the line to be judged. The day we stop asking those questions is the day we let the “experts” know they can get away with anything just by hanging some numbers on it.
VII. Conclusions
For the reasons explained in Part II, the old model of what kind of voter represents the swinging center of the electorate didn’t work in 2012 – in fact, the center wasn’t the decisive factor at all, but rather the huge margins in one corner of the electorate matched against a party that saw falling turnout among its natural base. Here in a single chart is the winning candidate’s share of the two-party vote among five groups traditionally thought of as swing voters since 1972 – independents, suburbanites, voters age 30 and up, white women, white Catholics:

Mitt Romney’s coalition among these five groups would have been the foundation of a clear national majority throughout the political era that ran from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and the polling practices that grew up in that era would have captured that majority’s formation. Pollsters have had to unlearn a lot of what they knew about polling in order to stay ahead of those changes in the electorate, and poll analysis does as well. The harder question will be how we can tell, other than after the fact, if the pollsters’ guesses don’t capture future shifts. Merely appealing to the idea that the majority of pollsters will always be right is an unsatisfying answer, especially given the follow-the-herd tendencies in the industry.
So the state poll averages were right, and really nothing that contradicted their narrative was. Does all of this mean that the state poll averages, and the models that run on them, will always be right in the future? Of course not. Anybody who has followed gambling prognosticators or stock pickers knows that winning streaks of couple of cycles do not always equal omniscience, even when backed by facially impressive-looking math. Unquestioning faith in mathematical models still has not been adequately called to account for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, for example. (On the other hand, climate models can only dream of the predictive success record of the state poll averages). Just because somebody gives you a prediction with numbers on it and is right a few times in a row doesn’t mean they always will be. If you look at this as a science, you have to recognize that we don’t have nearly enough data from presidential elections to constitute a meaningful sample size. And the fact that the poll averages were right because the pollsters changed the way they poll – in a world of ongoing technological and demographic change, and via methods that are themselves far from scientific – leaves us with a lot of uncertainties about whether they will make the right guesses again next time. Tom Jensen’s next “hunch” could be wrong. There might be elections in the future in which polls using likely voter screens are more accurate than polls that all but abandon the project. Skeptical examination of the assumptions behind the polls’ turnout forecasts will not go away, and should not go away.
But all that said, we’re conservatives; we learn from experience, and even when the process is questionable, results talk. The case for trusting state poll averages over all other indicators, at least in the stretch run of presidential elections, has been strengthened a good deal by a third consecutive cycle of those averages calling the result right in 48 or 49 states out of 50. The case for treating other indicators as predictive of turnout has been weakened and in some specific cases pretty badly discredited. And while I remain a little less firmly convinced of the value added by modeling of how undecided voters will break at the end – over and above the value of the poll averages themselves – the 538 model had a good election in that regard.
A final word. While I’ve been following elections for a long time, I really cut my teeth reading polls in the 2002 and 2004 elections. I recall well from those races seeing a lot of polls that were registered-voter polls or polls with D-heavy samples very favorable to Democrats, yet the end results were much more favorable to Republicans. In the presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and even 2008 (before the financial crisis), we repeatedly saw the polls shift towards the GOP when we got past Labor Day and most pollsters started using likely voter screens. I learned a lot from that experience, some of which is clearly still true, and some not.
But I also saw a lot about human nature that is eternally true. A lot of Republican pundits and poll-readers looked like geniuses in that period by projecting Republican wins in a lot of the competitive races. The lesson, then as now, is that it is easy to look smart when your own side is winning all the close ones. It doesn’t make you a bad or dishonest advocate for your side if you are better at predicting your side’s victories than its losses. But it means you are still one side’s advocate – and while I work hard to call things as I see them (I genuinely believed every word I wrote in this race), I make no bones about being an advocate.
But you have not really made it as a neutral arbiter of presidential polling – let alone a scientific one – until you have given both sides news they desperately do not want to hear. We will know Nate Silver has really made it as a presidential pollster when people on his own ideological side are screaming in terror at his conclusions, and not before.

The second part of my 3-part post-mortem on the polls and the 2012 election. See yesterday’s Part I here.
IV. Likely vs. Registered Voters
A. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Screen
Near the heart of every major polling controversy this year was the issue of sampling and likely-voter screens. Polls traditionally report results among either “all adults” (whether or not registered to vote), “registered voters,” or “likely voters.” Historically, there’s a well-recognized pattern: all-adults and registered-voter polls have tended to skew a couple of points in favor of the Democrats, and in the past this has usually been to the detriment of the accuracy of the polls. The pattern was especially pronounced this year; Bob Krumm noted before the election that Obama’s strength in national polls was directly correlated with how lenient the poll’s likely-voter screen was, and Nate Silver found the same effect in August, concluding:

It’s all a bit of a mess, frankly. I suspect that part of the problem is that polling firms are applying likely voter methods that might have been designed 30 years ago to a modern polling universe of extremely low response rates (even the most thorough polling firms can only get about 10 percent of voters to return their calls), cellphone-only households, and an increasingly diverse and partisan electorate – and that is producing erratic and unpredictable results. There’s always some uncertainty about just who will turn out to vote, but there is more of it than usual this year.

He also noted at the same time that Obama’s support was strongest among those poll screens considered least likely to vote.
Those screens have worked in the past; if they didn’t, the poll averages would have been useless a long time ago. This is why one of the regular rules of thumb in reading polls is that if a campaign is citing polls of registered rather than likely voters, especially late in the campaign, it’s doomed. Yet that’s exactly what Obama supporters were doing in the closing weeks, and more or less what Jim Messina was saying even after the election was over. For once, the registered-voter numbers were more accurate than the polls that put rigorous effort into likely-voter screening. The question is whether the pollsters actually had a good reason to do this, or whether they just got awfully lucky.
Part of what is supposed to make polling valuable is pollsters’ ability to judge which voters are likely to show up to vote. They get to the likely-voter number by first, constructing a sample of registered voters, and second, applying a series of screening questions to determine which of those voters is likely to vote. That’s what Messina was talking about in his argument that “traditional polling” was “broken” – the Obama campaign’s theory throughout the election was that pollsters using the kinds of likely voter screens that have worked in the past (like Gallup and Rasmussen) would be wrong this time. The lesson we learned, at least this year, is that Messina was right and the traditional, professional pollsters were wrong – and that the nature of Obama’s coalition made the application of likely voter screens particularly likely to affect the accuracy of the polls.
But determining which voters are likely to vote is the part of polling that is most inherently subjective and least scientific. Moreover, pollsters are often not very forthcoming about how they make these determinations, so sometimes when they release a poll, the best you can do is compare the number of registered and likely voters in the sample. As a result, a certain amount of deductive work is required to figure out why some polls give different results from others. There’s only so much we can know from the outside, but it appears that pollsters like Gallup and Rasmussen were, for much of the cycle, using likely-voter screens that made traditional assumptions about who would make the effort to vote – and those assumptions just didn’t hold this year, as illustrated by Gallup’s final poll envisioning an electorate that was 78% white (the exits said 72%). By contrast, a number of the polls that were later vindicated were reporting results that defied all historical precedents, classifying as many as 99% of registered voters as likely voters. Their process seemed problematic precisely because it was so different from the things that made polls trustworthy in the past, but they got results.
One of the pollsters that projected a Democrat-friendly electorate and ended up getting high marks in the post-election rankings of final polls was PPP, a Democratic pollster employed by SEIU and Daily Kos, among other clients whose identities are not known. PPP’s overall accuracy throughout election cycles is a longer story, but they did end up having a good record at the very end. Here’s Tom Jensen, the principal of PPP, discussing how his firm determines who is likely to vote:

Jensen conceded that the secret to PPP’s success was what boiled down to a well informed but still not entirely empirical hunch. “We just projected that African-American, Hispanic, and young voter turnout would be as high in 2012 as it was in 2008, and we weighted our polls accordingly,” he explained. “When you look at polls that succeeded and those that failed that was the difference.” Given the methodological challenges currently confronting pollsters, those hunches are only going to prove more important. “The art part of polling, as opposed to the science part,” Jensen said, “is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the equation in having accurate polls.”

In other words, the successful pollsters this cycle were doing exactly the same thing the poll skeptics were doing: making a more-or-less informed guess as to what the electorate would look like and weighting their results to match that. As Neil Stevens notes:

I don’t remember anyone willing to say PPP was actively rigging the polls to reach chosen results, but there it is in black and white. Jensen decided in advance what he wanted the electorate to look like, and so tweaked the numbers until he got what he wanted. This isn’t a whole lot different from what Research 2000 admitted to doing, folks.
In science, it’s not just that you got the answer you wanted. It’s the process that matters.

Research 2000, as you may recall, was PPP’s predecessor as DailyKos pollster, but had to be canned for more or less manipulating its data to get to results it wanted; Kos eventually sued them for fraud, which was settled out of court. Here’s what Nate Silver had to say about R2k at the time:

[I]n practice, a pollster will usually have enough knobs to twist between likely voter screens, weighting and sampling assumptions, etc., that they could back into almost any result they wanted more often than not. But there would usually be some scientific pretense for it.

In fact, Jensen’s hunches changed over the course of the race. Sean Davis calculated the demographic composition of PPP’s Florida polls over the course of the race, yielding the following percentages of white voters:

4/17: 71%…6/5: 70%…7/3: 69%…9/12: 70%…9/23: 69%…10/14: 66%……10/28: 64%…11/5: 66%

From April until September 23, PPP assumed an average white vote of 69.8%. From October 14 through November 5, PPP assumed an average white vote of 65%. What changed? Who knows?
It’s entirely possible, of course, that Jensen has some other source of information he’s not disclosing here, but taking him at his word, the “poll averages are science!” crowd should have just a little more humility about exactly what it is that they are placing their unquestioning faith in – Jensen believed that this year’s electorate would favor the candidate he favored, and he was right, but right in roughly the same way pundits are right when they say their side will win. Nuclear physics, this is not.
Once Jensen set his targets, he abandoned the likely-voter screening that has worked in the past – while firms that clung to it got burned:

How PPP got it right while others, including polling titans Gallup and Rasmussen, got it so wrong goes back to a difference in method for how the firms identify likely voters and how long they conduct a poll.
Rasmussen, for example, conducts most of its polls in one night – a problem, Jensen said, because many of the voters who typically lean Democratic (including African-Americans, Latinos and young voters) are more difficult to reach in a single night. Meanwhile, Gallup uses a complicated screen with numerous questions to determine which voters are likely to turn up at the polls.
Like Rasmussen, PPP uses robocalling to conduct its polls. But its screen is much simpler than either of the other polling firms.
“We have a very simple likely voter screen,” Jensen said, “‘If you don’t plan to vote in this fall’s election, hang up now.’
“What we find is that if you’re someone who’s not willing to take the time to answer a telephone poll, you probably aren’t going to vote. But if you are willing to take the time to answer a telephone poll, you probably are going to vote. So it’s a much less-complicated voter screen than somebody like Gallup or Rasmussen has, but I think that it’s a better barometer of the electorate.”

It also means the likely voter screen – like Jensen’s hunches – is completely opaque to the consumer of the poll. All you see is the opinions of the people Jensen decides should be polled, and who agree to talk to him.
Jensen’s not the only one in his industry who describes a process that is less and less hard-science:

Even pollsters themselves conceded that the combination of demographic and technological changes had made their supposed science more inexact than ever. “We’re in sort of what I would call polling’s dark age,” Jay Leve, who runs the polling firm Survey USA, told me earlier this fall. “We’re coming out of a period of time where everyone agreed about the right way to conduct research, and we’re entering into a time where no one can agree what the right way to conduct research is.”

Jason Zengerle draws the obvious conclusion:

[Nate Silver’s] appeal, of course, is that he’s scientific. And last night, his science worked because the polls themselves worked. But as polls become more art than science, Silver’s approach could become more tenuous. The good thing about pollsters – at least the good ones – is that they’re constantly reassessing and tweaking their approaches. That’s the bad thing, too, at least when it comes to having any certainty that about how they’ll perform in the future.

B. Why The Screen Mattered So Much This Time
Why did these differences in projecting the electorate matter? In an ordinary election, they would not: ordinary winning presidential candidates have a broad enough base of support that you can see it coming pretty clearly without needing the right “hunch.” But Obama was not an ordinary winning presidential candidate. The racially polarized electorate of the Obama era means that every slight shift in demographics can have an outsized effect on outcomes.
Let’s look at what the exit polls tell us. 81% of the electorate was voters age 30 and up; Romney won those by 2 points, 50-48. Drilling into the state-by-state exit polls, here’s a map of what the election would have looked like just among voters age 30 and up – losses with young voters cost Romney six states worth 95 electoral votes, more than enough to flip the election:

Historically, that is game-set-match; the last candidate to win the national popular vote while losing voters age 30 and up was Jimmy Carter in 1976:

Another 11% of the electorate was white voters under 30; Romney won those too, by 7 points, 51-44. These were Paul Ryan’s “faded Obama posters” voters – they swung 17 points from Obama winning them by 10 in 2008. Obama’s pop culture cache with young white voters had worn off by 2012 in the face of his record. That’s 92% of the electorate accounted for, and Romney up 50-48 and with a decisive lead in electoral votes. In other words, the 8% of the electorate consisting of non-white voters too young to have voted in the Bush v. Gore race in 2000 accounted for the entirety of Obama’s national margin of victory.
The “gender gap” was similarly a feature of race and racial turnout patterns. Romney won white women, who made up 38% of the electorate, by 14 points, 56-42; this was the biggest margin of victory among white women since Reagan in 1984. Obama in 2008 was the first winning candidate since Carter in 1976 to lose white women, but Carter lost them by 6, Obama last time by 7. Yet, Romney lost women overall by 11, 55-44. Why? He lost non-white women 85-15, including Hispanic women 76-23 and black women 96-3. Among non-white voters, Obama again maximized the group most favorable to him: black and Hispanic women were 14% of the electorate, compared to 10% black and Hispanic men, both of which Romney lost by less severely lopsided margins (Obama won black men 87-11 and Hispanic men 65-33). In other words, the black and Hispanic segment of the electorate was something on the order of 58% female; black voters were over 60% female. Romney had no similar redoubt of lockstep support – exit polls showed that even among Mormon voters, he didn’t crack 80%. So polls measuring turnout had to match two highly asymmetric campaigns, one winning majority groups with support in the 50s and 60s, the other winning much smaller groups by enormous margins.
You can slice the exit polls a few different ways and see similar results along racial lines (without reference to age or gender). Nate Cohn notes that black turnout in general was key to winning Ohio, as black voters were 15% of the electorate there, up from 11% in 2008. If you look solely at white and black voters and leave out Obama’s margins with Hispanic, Asian, and Native American voters, Romney wins five states he lost – Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania (very narrowly) and New Mexico – enough to swing the race:

Of course, white and black voters together are only 53% of the vote in New Mexico. Neither a campaign nor a poll analysis can safely ignore such segments of the electorate. But my point is that, because Obama’s margin of victory (both nationally and in the critical swing states) was entirely the result of his outsized margins with very narrow but homogenous segments of the electorate, the accuracy of polls was highly sensitive to the relative size of this segment in turnout compared to other voters.
Yet, voters under 30 in particular have rarely been a reliable source of voter turnout; for years and years, it has almost invariably been the case that a campaign losing with the rest of the electorate but placing its entire faith on high turnout from young voters was a losing campaign. Even Obama in 2008 didn’t do that: he won voters over 30, independents, and young white voters handily. His coalition was broader then, before he had a record.
It is true that Carter set a precedent in 1976 for appealing to the under-30 voters. But thanks to the Baby Boomers, the oldest of which were just hitting 30 at the time, voters under 30 were 32% of the electorate in 1976; today, thanks to shrinking birthrates and a graying population, they are just 19% and demographically likely to decline even further:

The last year in which under-30 voters were 20% of the electorate was 1992, not coincidentally the last election less than 20 years after Roe v. Wade. Take away 50 million abortions, and the demographics of the electorate look quite different in a race where the winning candidate will end up around 62 million votes. But while young voters are less numerous and traditionally a below-average turnout group, Obama for the second straight election cycle managed to increase them as a share of the electorate, closing in on their share of the population (Census data from 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2010 show 18-29 year olds as a steady 22% of the voting-age population; by contrast, with the Boomers graying, 30-44 year olds dropped in that time from 31% to 26% of the population, while 45-64 year olds rose from 30% to 35%). Here’s the major age groups’ turnout relative to their share of the general voting-age population:

And while the smallness of the age breakdowns among black and Hispanic voters creates rounding-error issues that make the math a little fuzzy, this chart illustrates rather vividly that the proportion of young voters among non-white voters as a whole was much, much larger than the proportion of young voters among white voters:

Voters under 30 made up somewhere north of a third of all Latino voters, compared to less than 15% of all white voters. Partly that, too, is demographics; the median age of Hispanics is 27 compared to 42 for white non-Hispanics. But it’s also the case that OFA maximized the showing of the few loyal groups that provided its entire margin of victory. Rasmussen came to a similar conclusion in evaluating why his polls were off:

A preliminary review indicates that one reason for this is that we underestimated the minority share of the electorate. In 2008, 26% of voters were non-white. We expected that to remain relatively constant. However, in 2012, 28% of voters were non-white. That was exactly the share projected by the Obama campaign. It is not clear at the moment whether minority turnout increased nationally, white turnout decreased, or if it was a combination of both. The increase in minority turnout has a significant impact on the final projections since Romney won nearly 60% of white votes while Obama won an even larger share of the minority vote.
Another factor may be related to the generation gap. It is interesting to note that the share of seniors who showed up to vote was down slightly from 2008 while the number of young voters was up slightly. Pre-election data suggested that voters over 65 were more enthusiastic about voting than they had been four years earlier so the decline bears further examination.

As Rasmussen notes, the demographic shift from 2008 could be higher non-white turnout, or lower white turnout (or both). Sean Trende has estimated that white voter turnout was down in absolute terms and in particular in proportion to white Americans’ share of the voting-age population:

Had the same number of white voters cast ballots in 2012 as did in 2008, the 2012 electorate would have been about 74 percent white, 12 percent black, and 9 percent Latino (the same result occurs if you build in expectations for population growth among all these groups). In other words, the reason this electorate looked so different from the 2008 electorate is almost entirely attributable to white voters staying home. The other groups increased their vote, but by less than we would have expected simply from population growth.
Put another way: The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator, it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator.

The 74% would be in line with Rasmussen’s assumptions, which were more reasonable than Gallup’s projection of a 78% white electorate. Byron York has more on the collapse of white voter turnout in Ohio by about 200,000 voters, which led to Romney getting fewer total votes there than John McCain in 2008.
The actual proportions in the voting-age population depend on how you read the Census data and break it out to exclude the non-voting-age. The Census showed non-Hispanic whites as 63.7% of the overall population (of all age groups) in 2010, compared to 69.7% in 2000, dropping to 63.4% in the 2011 Census estimate. Looking at Pew Hispanic Center data, the nation’s 215 million eligible voters are 72% white, 13% black, 11% Hispanic and 4% Asian; the electorate was 72% white, 13% black, 10% Hispanic and 3% Asian, which when you do the math means that 59% of eligible black voters voted, 58% of white voters, 53% of Hispanic voters and 41% of eligible Asian voters. In other words: high black voter turnout, especially by historic standards; low Hispanic and Asian turnout but rising by historic standards and in particular rising relative to the rest of the electorate:

Geographically, this map shows the distribution of states, with the higher percentages of non-Hispanic whites in darker blue:

Leaving race and age aside, other aspects of the exit polling, like the pre-election national polls and the internals of pre-election state polls, mostly present a picture of an incumbent president doomed to defeat in any ordinary political environment in recent memory. As noted, Romney won independents by 5 points; the last candidate to lose independents by more than 2 points and win the presidency or the popular vote was, again, Carter in 1976, who lost independents by 11 points but took advantage of a depressed, decimated and divided Republican base in the aftermath of Watergate and Reagan’s primary challenge to Ford. With the economy the number one issue throughout the election, voters told exit pollsters they trusted Romney more than Obama, albeit narrowly, 49-48. 77% of exit poll respondents said the economy was in not so good or poor shape, and Romney won those voters by 22 points, 60-38. 59% of the voters cited the economy as the top issue; Romney won them 51-47, plus winning 66-32 among the 15% of voters who cited the budget deficit. And this exit poll question was perhaps the most dramatic of all:

In basically any American election before 2012, I would tell you with great confidence that a candidate, much less an incumbent, is toast if he (1) loses independents; (2) loses voters age 30 and up; (3) loses white women by double digits; (4) loses white voters under 30; (5) is less trusted than his opponent on the economy when 59% of voters cited the economy as the dominant issue in the election; and (6) loses voters who prioritized leadership, strong values or a vision for the future. That has never before been the electoral profile of a winning candidate. As I said before the election, if it that changed, we need to rethink everything we know about elections.
We do – at least, for now, when Obama’s on the ballot. The OFA theory of the electorate was that “really, it’s different this time” – that neither the economic doldrums nor any other factor would dampen the historic levels of enthusiasm for Obama among non-white voters under 30. And as it turned out, OFA was right: they turned out in numbers totally out of step with their historic turnout patterns relative to their share of the voting-age population, and delivered the entirety of Obama’s national margin of victory.
Viewing this, to some extent, I feel like a guy who shorted the NASDAQ in 1998, reasoning that the tech bubble couldn’t last forever, and ended up getting mocked by the guys who watched all their “new economy” stocks rise without an end in sight. History teaches us that those guys, of course, eventually lost their shirts – but they were awfully proud of their “this time, it’s different” reasoning for quite a while. Time will tell if the believers in the new Democratic turnout model go the same way.
If it does, how will we know? Will polls run by partisan Democrats like Tom Jensen readjust their hunches? Or will we have to look outside the polls? I will look at these questions tomorrow in Part III.

As promised, a mea culpa on my pre-election poll analysis: why I was wrong, why the state poll averages were right – and why I’d say most of the same things if I had to do it over. I suppose I have lost a good deal of credibility with a number of people by making the kind of out-on-a-limb prediction I don’t usually make, and being wrong. But my assumptions have always been out in the open. Let’s examine why they led to the wrong answer, and which of those assumptions should be re-evaluated in the future.
I. More Evidence Is Better Than Less
Discussions of polling often lend themselves to more heat than light. A lot of the post-election poll commentary is even dumber than the pre-election poll commentary, as victorious liberals spin a narrative that conservatives were all “poll deniers” or “poll truthers” ignoring the polls. Now, it’s true that there were more than a few people on the Right who made intelligent discussion of the polls harder rather than easier. It’s also true that some of the efforts at “unskewing” the polls were unhelpfully ham-handed; in this pre-election essay I explained why Dean Chambers’ unskewedpolls.com was more alchemy than science. Chambers was projecting a strong Romney lead in the polls back in September, when neither I nor almost anybody I knew believed that Romney was actually ahead. My mantra on Twitter in August and September, like that of many conservatives I respect, was simply that it was a close race, that Obama had problems with independent voters and hadn’t closed the deal yet, and that there was still time for Romney to catch up to him. While a lot of Romney’s problems were baked-in by mid-summer, I don’t think that was an unreasonable view to take at the time; as it turned out, there would be twists in the race throughout October. But those of us who attempted to take the polls seriously, and drew conclusions from the polling evidence itself as well as external evidence, were not denying anything; we were just looking under the hood.
A. Believe The Polls, But Don’t Believe Only The Polls
Let me start by restating my philosophy of polling, and indeed my philosophy of examining most any question. Polls are not reality. They are a tool for measuring reality. They are traditionally the best single tool, and polling averages make them a better tool by evening out the outliers. But they are not perfect tools: public polls have called the outcome of races wrong before, or been off on the margins of victory by a significant amount. There are reasons why campaigns spend a lot of money on their own polls, which – other than for purposes like push-polling or testing messages – they would not do if an average of public polls was as flawless a guide to the electorate as a thermometer. If you think public poll averages are an infallible predictor, then the uniform practice of actual campaigns is totally irrational. Indeed, listen to Jim Messina, the nuts-and-bolts guru of the Obama campaign, on his view of public polling:

Every night, Obama’s analytics team would run the campaign 66,000 times on a computer simulation. “And every morning we would come in and spend our money based on those simulations,” said Messina.
Their models ultimately predicted Florida results within 0.2%, and 0.4% in Ohio. The only state they got wrong, noted Messina, was Colorado, “where we got one more point than we thought we would.”
The Obama campaign was able to do that, he said, because they turned away from mainstream polling from shops like Gallup, which he called “wrong the entire election,” in their prediction that fewer minorities and fewer young people would turn out to vote.
“We spent a whole bunch of time figuring out that American polling is broken,” said Messina. “We never did a national poll. We only did local and state polls.”

Is Messina a “poll truther” or “poll denier” for saying that “American polling is broken” or rejecting “traditional” polls? Was he wasting Obama’s money by running his own state and local polls instead of just reading 538? Or is he reflecting the fact that public polls involve a certain amount of guesswork about voter turnout that can only be definitively tested each new election cycle by the final vote tallies?
The most recent set of publicly available polls are also not the only tool for measuring reality. There are all sorts of metrics – some more hard and quantifiable than others – that have traditionally been useful in assessing the state of play: voter-registration numbers, early voting data and absentee ballot data, trendlines in the polls, what the pollsters themselves are reporting about voter enthusiasm, and hazier indicators like small-dollar donations and the size of crowds on the campaign trail. It’s hardly anti-empirical to examine these additional facts, and allow them to affect your conclusions. The people who correctly predicted that Harry Reid would hang on to beat Sharron Angle when the final polls said otherwise were looking at this kind of information. If all you did was read the RCP average or 538, you would have missed that.
None of these are reasons to disregard the polls; they should still be the primary item of evidence. But neither does it make sense to treat them with blind reverence and ignore all the external evidence – especially when (1) different sets of polls are in conflict with each other and (2) the internal breakdowns of the polls, which can act as a sanity check on the plausibility of the polls’ assumptions, are telling you that the polls in question are predicting something that is historically unlikely to happen.
To go back to one more example from baseball analysis (sabermetrics), this is sort of like the “statheads vs scouts” debate: whether you can better project a player’s future accomplishments by looking at his statistics or by listening to experts analyze his “tools.” I’m in the stathead camp: I believe strongly in quantifiable data, and I place it at the center of just about any baseball analysis I do. In fact, I probably err more often than not on overemphasizing the numbers. But as Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, has often said, sabermetrics (or any other field of hard science, soft science or would-be science) is not the search for statistics, it’s the search for truth, and in searching for the truth, you don’t blind yourself to some of the available evidence simply because it doesn’t fit in a column of your model. Most statheads today will tell you that no matter how good your statistical measurements and how highly you prioritize them, you can learn things from also listening to the scouts that you might not learn anywhere else. The scouts can’t tell you a guy with a terrible stat line is actually a major star – but in a close case, their view can make the difference.
B. Regrets, I Have A Few
If I had it to do over, maybe I’d be less definitive in pronouncing Obama “toast,” but for the most part I’d look at the same evidence, see the same things and draw the same conclusions I drew at the time. I do, however, have two main regrets.
First, which is an unfortunate side effect of doing punditry as a part-time unpaid hobby rather than a full time job, is that I should probably have spent more time breaking down the internals of all the battleground-state polls to see exactly how geographically consistent the national trends were: I had seen those trends confirmed in Ohio and a couple of the other key battleground states, and didn’t do the deep, time-consuming dive into the internals of every single battleground state. As it turned out, Romney did very well with independent voters in a number of the battleground states, but critically underachieved with them in others and lost those states. Romney beat Obama with independents by 5 points or more in Ohio (+10), Virginia (+10), North Carolina (+15), Nevada (+8), and Pennsylvania (+5). In more lightly-contested states, he won them in Missouri (+26), Indiana (+11), New Mexico (+8) and Arizona (+6). But in two other battleground states, his margin with independents was narrow: Colorado (+4), and Michigan (+1). And he actually lost independents in Iowa (-14), New Hampshire (-7), Florida (-3), Wisconsin (-1), and Minnesota (-4). (It says something about Romney that his biggest failure with independent voters, especially in states with lily-white electorates that didn’t present the demographic challenges apparent elsewhere, came in the places where the voters had been exposed at length to his scorched-earth 2008 and 2012 primary campaigns). In non-battleground states where exit polls were taken, independents mostly trended pro-Romney in red states – Alabama (+52), Mississippi (+34), Montana (+7) – and pro-Obama in blue states – California (-12), New York (-4), Illinois (-5), Vermont (-40), Maine (-28), Maryland (-12), Massachusetts (-7), Oregon (-7), Washington (-3), Connecticut (-3). In just two totally non-competitive states did independents buck the state’s partisan tilt: Romney won independents in New Jersey (+1), and Obama tied him in Kansas. If Romney had won all the states where he carried independents, he would have won, but not in all the states I thought he would win:

I might have caught some of this with more time to commit to each state, although in some cases, that weakness came out only in the very late polls. Or not; for example, PPP had Romney up by 2 with independents in New Hampshire on October 28, and up by 7 with independents in Florida the same day.
Second, and far more importantly, I didn’t do enough to re-evaluate my conclusion after declaring it on Twitter on October 19 and laying it out in detail on October 26, eleven days before Election Day – and that week turned out to be Romney’s high water-mark in the national and state polls. Nationally, Romney led in the RCP average all but two days between October 9 and October 31, and Obama was below 48% in the average every day from October 8 to November 5. In four key states, Romney had seized the lead in the RCP average: in Colorado, he led from October 9-29; in New Hampshire, he led from October 19-21; in Virginia, from October 19 to November 2; in Florida, from October 8 to the end of the race. Those leads gave me confidence that Romney’s momentum in the national polls was real and would leave him needing to pick off just one more state to win. Instead, he lost all four, and the state poll averages were predicting three of those four losses by Election Day. When I wrote my initial post, I assumed (given the lateness in the cycle and the evident deterioration of Obama’s position in the national polls and with independent voters by October 26), that there was not time for any new game-changing events. I was wrong.
I try hard to avoid confirmation bias in evaluating the evidence before reaching a conclusion – but it can be a lot harder to avoid it after publicly committing to a conclusion, which of course is the exact same “painted in a corner” problem I suspected Nate Silver of having. I spent the week after my “toast” post without electricity, internet, heat or hot water and only sporadically able to get to my office (I had written most of this essay when the lights went out on October 29), and probably did not spend enough of my remaining time going back over the subsequent polling to reconsider whether the conditions that seemed to show Obama in an untenable position were abating. (By Election Day, for example, the national poll averages were running in Obama’s favor as well). I remain doubtful that Hurricane Sandy had enough impact to swing the election and particularly doubtful that it did much to affect turnout, which decided the election; but its interruption of the dynamic of the endgame probably did do what the final week state and national polls showed happening: cut into Romney’s lead with independents and possibly cost him his chance to win New Hampshire, Virginia, and/or Florida. Exit polls showed that late-deciding voters broke in Obama’s favor, which I had not expected to happen for an incumbent whose approval ratings and favorability with independent voters had been underwater for so much of his term.
II. Poll vs. Poll
The polls, particularly the national and swing-state polls in the third and fourth weeks of October, were telling consistent stories about the opinions of different groups of voters, but contradictory stories about the numbers in which those groups would show up to vote. I looked at internal evidence, and saw that Romney was winning independents handily and Obama was drawing nearly no crossover support from Republicans, which meant Obama needed to win entirely by having enough extra Democrats vote to overcome Romney’s independent advantage. The first premise was borne out by Romney’s win with independents and slight edge with crossovers, although his 5-point margin with independents was at least 3 points smaller than the margin most polls had been showing when I first made my “toast” call. Had Romney carried independents by 8 or 9, as the polls were showing at the time, and not lost them in a few key states, Obama would have needed at minimum a D+4 electorate to win nationally. As it turned out, Obama won by about 2 points with a D+6 electorate compared to 2008’s D+7; Democratic turnout was down a point from 2008, but Republican turnout matched the 32% of 2008. So, my analysis correctly judged what Obama needed to do. The historic turnout conditions of 2008, which I believed were necessary for Obama to win, were effectively repeated.
There were all sorts of reasons, based in history and observable fact, to believe that those turnout conditions were unlikely to repeat themselves. Republican turnout had been unusually low in 2008 – the lowest since before Ronald Reagan started converting a lot of people to the party – following the historic financial crisis and 8 years of Bush, and had bounced back in 2010. While 2010 was a midterm election and involved a distinct electorate, its results underscored that there seemed no obvious reason to believe it would approach that nadir again. History tells us to treat with caution the assumption that elections held in the aftermath of a catastrophic event like the 2008 financial crisis are representative. The harder metrics, which I will discuss in Part III, also suggested GOP turnout was still doing well, if not as well as in the off-year elections of 2010. And the vaunted OFA turnout machine could only count for so much: certainly, no matter how sophisticated Obama’s turnout operation, low GOP turnout was something he could not manufacture through operational efficiency. Obama had polled poorly in areas like job approval for most of his tenure, and campaigns that lose independent voters tend to be losing at least some of the enthusiasm of their base as well. As I will discuss below, virtually all the features of Obama’s profile in the polls – mirrored in the post-election exit polls – were traditionally characteristic of losing candidates, as were the nature of the “this time it’s different, really!” arguments made by his boosters. It had to be different for him to win. The customary laws of political gravity had to be defied. And they were.
As I’ll get to more in Part II, with regard to turnout, what the exit polls show is that Obama really did do something that was very, very historically unusual – and on top of that, and perhaps even more importantly, Romney’s GOTV operation (both the mechanics and his ability to inspire marginal Right-leaning voters to show up) turned out to be far less than projected. This time, it really was different. And the challenging question going forward is whether it will stay that way.

Continue reading Sometimes, It Really Is Different This Time – A Polling Post-Mortem (Part I of III)

It’s time to start making final predictions for the 2012 election. I’m also rounding up predictions from others who are out on the limb with me predicting a Romney victory. I still feel fairly confident about my bottom line: Romney will win. But until we see the actual voter turnout, it’s hard to project more than educated guesswork as to the size of that win.
The Electorate and the Popular Vote
The final week of polling has been even more of a mess than usual in a season in which the polls have made less and less sense both internally (their assumptions about turnout and the conflict between the toplines and Romney’s margins with independents) and externally (how the polls’ views of turnout conflict with every other item of evidence outside the polling). Josh Jordan notes the particularly unstable polling of independents in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
But while some of the more garish double-digit margins are gone, the latest battery of national polls shows Romney’s standing vs Obama with independents most likely somewhere around a 7 point lead: CNN/ORC (+22, but with the smallest of sample sizes), Monmouth/SUSA (+16), Rasmussen (+9), WaPo/ABC (+7), NBC/WSJ (+7), Pew (+4), Gallup (-1).
What will turnout look like? First up, we have Rasmussen’s October 2012 Party ID survey; I’ve revised my chart to look at the historical track record since 2004 of his October survey:

That’s an R+6 electorate. Obama is clearly, in my view, doomed if the electorate is D+3 (the historical average for presidential elections since 1984) or less, and probably needs about D+6, maybe D+5 (the 2000 electorate) to win. We haven’t had an R+ electorate for a presidential election since probably the 1920s (2004 was even); we may not have had an R+6 electorate since Reconstruction ended. If Rasmussen’s survey is even half right, Democrats could be in for a very, very rough night across the board. Even as accurate as Rasmussen has been, I’m hesitant to go out all the way on that limb – but it’s hard to argue with his record on this front. The survey encompasses a huge sample, on the order of 15,000 interviews.
It may be tough to measure the final electorate, because exit polls won’t capture early voters, and in some states that’s a lot of people. (The Denver Post cites Colorado Secretary of State figures showing more than 62% of the state’s registered voters have voted already, with a turnout of R+2). My prediction for the national turnout is a conservative one: D+2, D 37/R 35/I 28. Assuming Romney wins Republicans 94-6, Obama carries Democrats 93-7, and Romney wins independents 53-47 – again, a conservative projection given the polls – that gives us Romney 50.3%, Obama 49.7%.
(If you run those same assumptions in the electorate from Rasmussen’s party ID survey, you get Romney 53.7%, Obama 46.2% – and it gets wider from there if the spread among independents gets into double digits. But I’m being conservative here, as I still expect the more likely outcome to be fairly close).
The Electoral College
I start with this map, with Romney up 235-190:

Obama is still running ads in North Carolina and still contesting Florida; Florida is usually close, but I see no real likelihood that it goes for Obama again.
Then, let’s take off the board the states where Romney is only going to win if it’s really breaking big for him – I’m actually now including Nevada and not Pennsylvania in that category, and to be cautious, Maine’s 2d Congressional District – and the states I’d almost written off in September where I now think Romney is in very solid shape (Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire):

Romney 261, Obama 223. Iowa becomes irrelevant at this point – Romney wins one of the remaining three, or Obama wins all three, and it’s game over. But I don’t actually see Pennsylvania being the one to get Romney over the line if he loses Ohio and Wisconsin. Playing it safe, I end up with Romney taking just one of those four – Wisconsin – and a narrow electoral college win, 271-267:

If Romney wins, as I project, I strongly suspect that he will win at least one of the other three, maybe all three. But Wisconsin is my pick for the state that puts him over the hump.
The Senate
Here’s RCP’s current map of the Senate races, projecting each side picks up 3 seats, netting no change to the Democrats’ 53-47 advantage:

That’s a very disappointing outcome from where the GOP should have been, but probably not as bad as it has looked most of the past two months. I’m going to be absurdly bullish and say R+2 Senate seats because I can’t look across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, and Missouri and see the Democrats going better than 5-for-7. There are different reasons in different races – Mourdock and Akin will have strong GOP turnout advantages at their backs, Scott Brown is just a tough campaigner, and Smith, Mandel, Thompson and Allen all have the swing state ground games behind them. Add in Montana and it will take a big set of Romney coattails for the Republicans to win half or more of those eight races – but 3 out of 8 hardly seems unreasonable if the presidential race is going well.
(It’s also impossible to be sure how the Maine Senate race will come out – three-way races are notoriously hard to poll – but I’ll nonetheless be surprised if Angus King doesn’t win and caucus with the Democrats. A 50 D/49 R Senate with Paul Ryan as the VP could put King in position to be a tremendous power broker.).
Like most people, I’m not even bothering with a House prediction, other than to reiterate a point Neil Stevens has made: if the electorate was really going to look like the D+7 Democratic wave of 2008, we’d be talking about a ton of Democratic House pickups (redistricting or no) and a threat of the return of Speaker Pelosi. But at this point, even the DCCC seems to have all but thrown in the towel; Nate Silver doesn’t even seem to be tracking odds for a Democratic House pickup. That suggests that down-ticket Democrats are looking at a much more realistic universe.
Around The Horn
Michael Barone has Romney 315, Obama 223. I’m always in good company agreeing with Barone.
Ben Domenech, who was predicting an Obama win until the past month, has Romney 278, Obama 260, with Wisconsin the deciding state.
Gerry Daly’s map has Romney 296, Obama 242.
Neil Stevens’ map has Romney 279, Obama 190 even with a bunch of states up in the air.
Josh Jordan walks through why he has Romney 295, Obama 243 and Romney by 50.5 to 48.5 in the popular vote.
Bob Krumm walks through 5 scenarios.
Jim Geraghty looks at when pollsters have been wrong.

The centerpiece of my thesis (discussed here and here) that Mitt Romney will win Tuesday’s election is his consistently strong showing among independent voters (ie, voters who identify as neither Republicans nor Democrats) across the majority of national and state polls, pretty much regardless of whether those are polls he’s winning or losing. On that score, I believe the polls; if they’re wrong about the independent vote, my analysis is essentially irrelevant. But if they’re right, I believe I’ll be proven right. If Romney goes on to win independents nationally by 5+ points and carry independents by more than a few points in states like Ohio and Wisconsin, he will win.
Obama can only overcome that kind of deficit among independents by decisively winning the partisan turnout battle – indeed, the polls that show him winning nationally or on a state-by-state basis do so almost uniformly by projecting a decisive advantage in Democratic turnout – but when you look for evidence outside of the polling samples themselves of that Democratic turnout advantage, you won’t find it.
There are two main arguments currently circulating for why Obama will win in spite of these factors. Both are premised upon the notion that the Obama-favoring polls are correctly projecting an electorate on the order of 2008’s D+7 (D 39/R 32/I 29) electorate, in which Obama’s turnout advantage will outweigh his loss of independent voters. I dealt on Wednesday with the first of those: Nate Silver’s polling model, which simply assumes that state-level polls are correctly projecting the turnout, on the theory that state polling averages have historically been trustworthy.
The other main argument comes from Josh Marshall. Marshall’s thesis is that independents are supporting Romney because the ranks of independent voters have been swelled by “an exodus from the GOP to the right”:

In other words, a lot of people left the Republican party, in identification terms. But they didn’t become Democrats. And it doesn’t seem (at least from the politics of the last two years) like they became more moderate of ‘centrist’ in ideological terms. They simply reidentified themselves as independents… I think in a lot of cases they actually re-identified because the GOP wasn’t right-wing enough, call it a Tea Party exodus from the GOP.
…[W]hat does not seem in doubt is that a lot of people who had called themselves Republicans started calling themselves independents, notwithstanding the fact that there’s little evidence they became less conservative.
And if that’s the case, you can see without much problem how Romney could be winning independents: because a lot of those independents are people who used to be Republicans. Or to put it another way, the pool of independents got a lot more conservative without changing the overall composition of the electorate. You just had a zero-sum transfer between Republican and independent.

This is a plausible-sounding theory, if you think independent voters are some sort of strange new phenomenon never before seen on the American electoral landscape, and Marshall backs it up with a colorful line graph showing the results of what he describes as various national party ID surveys. But it does not stand up to scrutiny.
Let’s look at a screenshot of Marshall’s chart; you can go click over to TPM if you want to play around with the various bells and whistles on it:

First of all, as Marshall himself admits, “we keep this data set of ‘adults’ rather than registered or likely voters. That makes it somewhat different from the voting electorate. …These are polls which simply ask people over 18, how do you identify in partisan terms.” As anyone who follows elections even remotely closely knows, polls of “all adults” are completely worthless, and a campaign whose supporters are citing polls of “all adults” rather than registered or likely voters six days before an election is doomed.
Second, notice something about the math here: Marshall is citing a collection of surveys that say the population is 32.5 D/25.2 R/33 I at present – which adds up to 90.7% of the people. What happened to the other 9.3%? As of the line in the middle representing the 2010 election, he shows the population as 34.2 D/30.2 R/28 I – again, 92.4% of the people, with 7.6% unaccounted for. Around Election Day 2008, it shows 39.4 D/30.6 R/25.2 I – 95.2% of the population, with 4.8% unaccounted for. It’s impossible to translate those kinds of large omissions into a useful tool for analyzing the electorate. (In fact, Marshall shows independents outnumbering Democrats – and if that happens, I promise you, Obama is toast).
Third, it doesn’t match up to the actual voter turnout. Exit polls in 2008 show 39% D and 31% R, numbers consistent with the chart, but 29% rather than 25% I. For 2010, it’s way off: Marshall’s chart has the population at 30.2% Republican and a D+4 advantage for Democrats, when in fact we know the exits showed a D 36/R 36/I 28 electorate. Somehow, the 7.6% of the people not accounted for turned out to almost all be Republicans. Marshall makes no effort to test how any of these surveys (or his rolling average of surveys) has matched up historically to the actual electorate, unlike my comparison of the track record of the Gallup and Rasmussen party ID surveys (both of which he mysteriously leaves out of his average) dating back over multiple elections. I will trust the people who have done this before and been proven reliable.
If it was true that success with independent voters was the result of defectors from the party, you would expect recent and longer-term history to show an inverse relationship between success with independents and partisan turnout – that is, you’d expect to see Republicans doing better with independents when GOP turnout is low, and Democrats doing better with independents when Democratic turnout is low. There is, in fact, some evidence that that was true before 1984, when a lot of independents and “Reagan Democrats” started self-identifying as Republicans. But since then, if you look at the presidential election years and the last two off-year Congressional elections (2006 and 2010), what you see in general is more like the opposite relationship: parties tend to do better with independents when they are turning out a lot of their own partisans. This chart shows the percentage of Democrats and Republicans in the electorate each of those years, along with each party’s share of the two-party vote among independents (that is, I dropped out the percentage of independents voting for Ross Perot, John Anderson, etc.):

As you can see, Democrats did well with independents in years like 1996, 2006 and 2008 when Democratic turnout was up, indicating that good partisan environments/candidates drew Democrats to the polls and attracted independent voters. Republicans did better with independents in 2010 when Republican turnout was up. Independents were closely divided in 2000 and 2004. This is what anybody who has spent any time working in the fields of campaigns, polling or election punditry would expect to see – strength with independent voters nearly always goes hand-in-hand with the party-base enthusiasm that drives good voter turnout. A big Democratic turnout year and small Republican turnout year at the same time as a big Republican surge with independent voters is out of whack with history.
I don’t doubt that, anecdotally, a fair number of people left the GOP after 2008 to join the long-time Perotista faction and build a core bloc of Tea Party-friendly independents. Rasmussen’s surveys suggest that a good chunk of those people came home to the GOP by the time of the 2010 election, and if they didn’t, they were replaced by other Republicans, because GOP turnout in 2010 was the best it had been since 2004. Marshall’s theory that Republicans have collapsed to something resembling 25% of the electorate is frankly inexplicable in light of the 2010 elections (and the 2012 recall election, in Wisconsin).
For an example of why this makes no sense, let’s look at one of the latest pieces of evidence outside the polling that supports a more Republican electorate: as Ed Morrissey notes, a recent study shows voter regstration across 8 states that register voters by party (FL, NC, CO, NV, NM, IA, PA & NH; states like OH & VA don’t) shows a net 1.3% increase in Republican registration since 2008 and a net 2.5% decrease in Democratic registration, while independent registration has boomed, up 14.4%. You can read that registration data to show that being an independent is still a lot more popular choice than being a Republican these days; you can’t sensibly read it to show that the growth of independent voters is the result of a decreasing base of Republican voters, and you can’t possibly read it to show that the total share of Republicans and independents is holding steady or declining relative to the Democrats.
I would be very shocked if Republicans are just 25% of the voters in this election. I bet Josh Marshall would too.