And nobody I know even noticed! Nobody told me!
Morton Kondracke: Election Oddsmakers Suffering From Fuzzy Math: Nate Silver, the New York Times’ election modeler, gives Obama a 65.7 percent chance of winning. Granted, this is down from 85 percent before Obama’s disastrous first presidential debate, but it still strikes me as out there. Intrade, the share-buying website, had Obama as a 64.2 percent favorite as of today…. My read is that, in the first debate, Romney came off as a plausible president, knowledgeable on the issues and a decent guy — while Obama didn’t engage — and that the election’s been moving in Romney’s direction ever since….
The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has Romney up by 1 point — meaning, a tie — but the Gallup seven-day tracking poll shows Romney up by 7 points among likely voters…. Assigning electoral votes to the candidate who’s ahead in state polls, Real Clear Politics gives Obama 294…. But Romney has moved ahead in polls in Colorado, North Carolina and Florida. And, since the first debate, he’s moved up 11 points in New Hampshire and 4 points in Virginia, now virtual ties, and almost 4 points in crucial Ohio, where Obama now leads by only 2.4 percent. Iowa and Wisconsin are also in play.
So, bottom line, legally you can’t place a bet in Las Vegas on the outcome of this election, but if you did so in London, you might just make a pile.
To be very clear: between October 13 and October 18, each day the state-level polls coming in had shown marginal improvements for Obama over what had been the case the day before. It did not require rocket science to know this--it just required reading the polls, and comparing the polls to previous polls--the kind of thing even a Roll Call editor should be able to do...
