Cheer Up! We’re Winning!

Sam Wang on David Brooks

It was fun to learn of David Brooks’s addiction to polling data. He spends countless hours on them, looking at aggregators, examining individual polls, and sniffing poll internals. From all of this, what has he learned?

  1. Today, President Obama would be a bit more likely to win.
  2. There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney.

(Emphasis mine.)

I am having a sad. All of that effort, and his two conclusions still have two major errors. Evidently he does not read the Princeton Election Consortium. Let us dissect this.

First — in truth, says Professor Wang, President Obama is a lot more likely to win. He calculates the probability of an Obama electoral college win at about 90 percent.

Second — the Professor says the Romney surge ended about October 11 and began to reverse on October 16. Nate Silver is a bit more cautious about the probability of an Obama win (73 percent as of this morning), but he agrees Ro-mentum is over. Nate says Romney peaked on October 12 and has been losing ground since.

See also the RAND tracking poll and the most recent Pew state results.