That’s the question a loyal posed in response to our post The state of the race … 3 views.
Well, Vegas doesn’t take bets on the Presidential election, so best we can do is PredictWise … which averages Intrade and Betfair
Of course, these odds are heavily influenced by the polls.
With a little more than 2 weeks to go in the Presidential race ….
Gallup’s daily tracking survey reported that Romney’s lead widened to 7-points … 52% to 45%.
Karl Rove (hard right, of course) was on talk shows yesterday saying that no candidate who has been over 50% on Gallup 3 weeks out has ever lost the general election.
Nate Silver (New York Times, hard left) was leading the charge to debunk Gallup. More on Nate below
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RealClearPolitics poll-of-polls had Romney up by a point at 47.7%
But, RealClearPolitics had a major change in it’s electoral votes recap.
For the first time it’s tally of “likely & leans” states had Romney in the lead … 206 to 201.
When toss-up states (i.e. those within the margins of errors) are assigned to candidates, Obama maintains a narrowing lead 294 to 244.
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Nate Silver of the New York Times is the self-anointed gold standard of polling and darling of the left.
He throws a lot of numbers around … says he’s unbiased … but seems to have a penchant for cherry-picking.
Case in point: the Gallup results.
Silver’s prediction model weights Gallup pretty high … 12%.
But, since Gallup didn’t give the answer that Nate liked this week, he wrote an article titled “Gallup vs. the World” that said Gallup performs poorly when out of the consensus … so, it should be discounted or dismissed as an outlier.
In fact, he went counter Gallup and increased Obama’s chances of winning the Electoral College to 65.7 percent from 64.8 percent.
More specifically, he pegged the Electoral College at 292 to 246 … roughly in line with RCP’s no leaners scenario.
And, Silver continued to show Obama leading in the popular vote by 1.5 points … with a majority.
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OK, with these markers set, we’ll circle back on these surveys after the election.
The Homa Files 