Sorry, Donald (and Nate): Any Polling Error Will Favor Clinton

For much of this last Sunday before election day, I grappled with the challenge of how to write -- and then stagger -- two separate blog columns. (#whitepeopleproblems.) The first of these two hypothetical columns was supposed to be a summary of where things stand with respect to early voting; the second one was supposed to be a friend-of-the-court brief regarding the geek war between the editors of the Huffington Post, and Nate Silver. And it's no small testimony to the sloppy file structures inside my head that it took until late this afternoon for me to realize that these had actually been the same column, all along.

Unless you've been vacationing on Neptune, you probably know by now that most of the leading polling firms have shown a marked tightening of the electoral horse race between Trump and Clinton -- presumably in response to the October cudgel delivered to Trump campaign HQ on a silver platter by the Director of the FBI. Timed to inflict maximum political damage, Director Comey's letter to Congress about his re-opening of the Clinton/email investigation was released at the precise moment that early voting began in many of the most crucial battleground states.

The effect has been to dramatically alter both the complexion and the media narrative of the race: from one in which Clinton was as inevitable as any Presidential candidate since Nixon's reelection bid in '72, to one in which literally anything could happen and probably would. But a funny thing happened along the way to Comey's role in upending the fate of the world: In terms of the actual dynamics of the race, there seems to have been much less impact than the polling data might otherwise suggest. The polls are, with apologies to Mitt Romney's supporters from 2012, genuinely and provably missing the drift of this thing, this time -- and Secretary Clinton is the direct and ubiquitous beneficiary of their collective mistake. This is an unusually long column even by my standards, so I hope you'll bear with me.

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Final Predictions, Part Two

With the benefit of a couple of extra days of dust-settling (to say nothing of one last, momentous call for President Obama in the Sunshine State), the postmortem on the 2012 election has hit its stride, with some pretty interesting results: Republicans, for the most part, are in less of a de-legitimizing frame of mind than I might have predicted, and not independently the White House seems poised to flex a little bit of its post-electoral muscle. Both outcomes are worthy of a few thoughts here.
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Ohio, Ohio, ...Virginia?

I tried to stay away from blogging about this election and for a long time -- up until the Republican National Convention in Tampa -- I succeeded. But as Sherman once said to Grant, "You could never stay home when armies are moving." And so there came a point in the cycle where I just couldn't help myself. I hope those of you who've subscribed and read these columns have found them interesting, if not always particularly connected with reality. (This is what I hope my friends think about me generally, if it comes to that.)

First, some housekeeping: I will once again be live-blogging the election returns as they come in this evening, though I don't think I'll be using the map gadget to do so since it stalls out my ability to update in anything like real-time. There will be many maps from which to choose, and all being orderly and well this evening, they will all look approximately the same from one moment to the next. That out of the way, let's consider together where things stand one last time, with our focus on a state that hasn't been getting a lot of street cred in the battle for tipping-point status, at least so far.

No matter how one feels about the competing narratives about the state of the race, it isn't being argued by any reasonably non-partisan pundit out there that the President doesn't at least have the polling momentum on his side in these last few days of the campaign. And that, it turns out, has presented a comparatively new and daunting obstacle to the prospects of Mr. Romney.
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Final Predictions, Part One

In my most recent post I observed that the state-level polling data seems to be lagging the actual condition of the race on the ground, and yesterday's and today's polling data has done nothing to disabuse me of that intuition. Survey USA has the President up in Colorado (without which Romney can't win), Marist has him up in Florida (without which Romney can't win), and PPP has him up in Ohio (without which Romney cannot win). With these new polls emphasizing the short shelf-life of any supposed insights, and allowing that the lid isn't exactly 'on' between now and Tuesday, it seems to me that the time is right to make a few predictions.
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Mitt Romney's Really, *Really* Bad Week

Seven days ago, the 2012 Presidential election was close -- to be sure closer than it should've been in the absence of the Denver debate -- with Barack Obama leading on the rail by a neck. He was up by about two points in Ohio and about three points in Nevada, with Iowa, Colorado and Virginia tied. Mr. Romney was narrowly ahead in Florida and North Carolina, but the dynamics of the race in these two places were suggesting to some pretty smart people (Nate Silver, among them) that things weren't really that close. Romney's path to electoral college victory was simple, if not enviable: Close the gap in Ohio, hold in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado.  Doing so would have been an upset, but a mild one, mostly involving a gotcha pickup in the Buckeye state.

Seven days later the map isn't really all that different, or at least doesn't immediately *sound* all that different in laundry-list form like this: Mr. Romney is narrowly ahead in North Carolina and Colorado, with Florida and Virginia more-or-less tied, and Mr. Obama leading in Iowa and Nevada and Ohio. Why is it, then, that the state-of-the-race feels so completely different?

The easy answer is that the week Mr. Romney just had is one of the worst of his entire campaign -- and after London and 47%-gate, that's definitely saying something -- and the polls really haven't caught up yet. State-level polling is notoriously slow to respond to the changing realities on the ground, since polls have to be in the field over multiple days, then regressed, then scrutinized for math errors, then written-up, then published by the polling firm, and then re-published by political news sites, all before any of us get a chance to begin factoring them into our sense of where things stand. The data is often over a week old, and even some of that data will itself display a conspicuous lag, as individual respondents in the process of changing their mind will often exhibit more stubbornness about it than they really feel, just to avoid having to re-reverse themselves a day or two latter.

The slightly less easy answer, though, is that while the two lists of swing-state standings I've digested in the opening two paragraphs sound cosmetically similar, the new list actually describes an electoral map in positive *shambles* for Mr. Romney -- even before the effects of this past week can fully manifest there. The only way, then, to accurately report in real time on the question of just how much things have  turned, is to begin with a recap of the seven days that Mr. Romney has just had. And oh my goodness, what a week it was.
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