November 5, 2012

Gravis has Romney and Obama tied up 49/49 in Florida.

President Obama and Governor Romney are tied in the final day of the presidential campaign in Florida. Florida voters currently give each candidate 49 percent of the vote.

• President Obama holds a five percentage point lead with early voters (52 to 47 percent), while Mitt Romney leads by 4 percentage points with those who have not yet cast their ballot (50 to 46 percent). Half of voters (50 percent) say they have already voted in Florida.

• 46 percent of Florida voters approve of President Obama’s job performance, while more than half (51 percent) of likely voters do not approve of his performance.

• 46 percent of Florida likely voters think the country is headed in the right direction, while 49 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction.


http://www.gravispolls.com/2012/11/final-florida-poll-shows-dead-heat.html

November 5, 2012

Does this HAVE to be Obama's last campaign?

Let's assume for a moment that he's re-elected (as I expect).Dos this have to be his last campaign? He's a young man and it's possible that the City of Chicago might be well served with him as Mayor. Yes, I know, City Hall is not the White House, but helping to improve Chicago neighborhoods should not be beneath him. I hope this isn't it.

November 5, 2012

It's official: ABC Poll is out with O up 50-47

http://t.co/ZYag2jRs

November 5, 2012

Rass gives up on NH. Has POTUS up 50/48

Just appeared on my phone.

November 5, 2012

UNF poll has Obama up 49-45 in Florida.

I never heard of these guys before.


http://www.scribd.com/doc/109614609/Toplines-10-10-12

November 5, 2012

Romney's going to Pittsburgh tomorrow.

Just heard it on MSNBC.

November 5, 2012

Final Gallup poll has Romney up 49/48. Calls it a tie.

Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport tells Bloomberg Businessweek that the release of Monday’s tracking poll, set for 1 p.m., will show Mitt Romney leading President Obama 49 percent to 48 percent among likely voters nationally. This is the first tracking poll released since Hurricane Sandy and notable for the strong movement to Obama. The last Gallup poll on Oct. 29 showed Romney up by 5 points–51 percent to 46 percent. Romney’s one-point lead is within the margin of error and, statistically speaking, amounts to a tie. “It’s tied today at 1 o’clock,” Newport said by phone Monday morning.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-05/breaking-gallup-to-show-romney-obama-in-dead-heat

November 5, 2012

Why Obama's ground game is better.

The challenge for a campaign, of course, is to sort voters into those two categories without the benefit of such visible markers. In an ideal world, a campaign would interview every voter to discern his or her likelihood of casting a ballot and the candidate he or she supports. But no campaign has the money or manpower to track down and survey even a sizeable fraction of the voting public, either through volunteers or paid operations. So campaigns use data about the electorate to increase the quality of their guesses about which voters are likely to have green noses and which ones purple ears. For decades, political targeters had to use geographic or demographic heuristics (classifying precincts based their past vote performance or Census tracts based on their complexion) to sort voters into those categories en masse. With the individual-level voter data and statistical analysis available to today’s campaigns, they can now sort voters one by one.

Over a two-week stretch starting at the end of July, the Obama campaign’s analytics department contacted 54,739 voters from paid call centers and asked them how they planned to vote. Obama’s databases already knew a lot about the approximately 180 million registered voters in the United States (and even a bit about those who weren’t registered, in a way that could help guide the campaign’s efforts to enroll them). The goal was to collect intelligence about potential voters’ 2012 intentions and distill that down to a series of individual-level predictions. The most important of these scores, on a range from 0 to 100, assessed an individual’s likelihood of supporting Barack Obama and of casting a ballot altogether.

Modeling turnout was thought to be easier than modeling support, since how citizens vote is a private concern but whether or not they do is a matter of public records. In reviewing the attributes of 2008 voters, Obama’s analysts confirmed that the most useful predictor of turnout was past vote history. For years, campaigns would sort voters by these criteria—assuming that someone who had participated in two of the past four elections was more likely to turn out than someone who had turned out for only one—and the Obama campaign used this as the basis for a basic typology. Those who had voted in the 2010 elections were classified as “midterm voters”; those who had voted in 2008 but not in 2010 were called “sporadic voters.”

But splitting the electorate into only three or four categories didn’t leave much opportunity to assign priority to individual voters, or room to draw granular distinctions among them. More perilously for Obama, a pure reliance on vote history didn’t help to predict the behavior young voters, because the campaign simply did not have enough of a track record to assess. The president will rely for his re-election on young people, who overwhelmingly supported him in 2008 but tend to be fickle voters. Which kids had a thin voting history because they only recently became eligible to cast a ballot and which ones because they weren’t the type of people who could be counted on to vote?


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/11/obama_s_get_out_the_vote_effort_why_it_s_better_than_romney_s.single.html

November 5, 2012

CA: Prop 32 going down in flames.

Opposition to a controversial campaign finance ballot measure has grown over the last six weeks and now outnumbers support by 16 percentage points, according to a new Field Poll.

Of the likely voters surveyed last month, 50 percent said they'll vote no on Proposition 32, up six points from September. On the other side, 34 percent intend to vote yes, compared with 38 percent a month earlier. The other 16 percent remain undecided.

The gap between yes voters and no voters has more than doubled to 16 percentage points since September. Such trends tend to strengthen in the final days of an election cycle, said poll director Mark DiCamillo.

"Odds are that this will be defeated," he said.



http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2012/11/2/poll_shows_opposition_growing_to_prop.htm

November 5, 2012

CA Prop 30 just might pass!

Public support for Gov. Jerry Brown's initiative to raise taxes remains below 50 percent, but the measure no longer appears to be on a downward trajectory, leaving Brown within striking distance one week before Election Day, according to a new Field Poll.

Likely voters favor the initiative 48 percent to 38 percent, with 14 percent undecided, according to the poll.

Voters surveyed late last week and early this week were marginally more likely to favor the initiative than those surveyed in previous days. Of voters who have already cast ballots, 54 percent voted for the initiative, the poll found.

"If there was some reason to believe that this thing was sinking, you should have seen it over the course of the two weeks we were interviewing," poll director Mark DiCamillo said. "It seems to be treading water. ... All they need are two or three percentage points, and there's certainly a sufficient number of undecideds from which to get that."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/poll-finds-jerry-brown-ha_n_2055950.html