Nov. 4, 2008

Is this true?
From Radical Center at 538, 10/9/08:

Even some of the media outlets have been letting go of the 'razor-thin-margin-too-close-to-call-statistical-dead-heat-anyone's-race' mantra and actually stating what those of us with polling data and a spreadsheet have been saying for weeks. It's not really that close people. It was the same way during the primaries - the storyline after Super Tuesday was always 'Obama leads by the narrowest of margins'. All a real journalist had to do is go to Wikipedia, copy their HTML chart into Excel, and play with numbers to find that the votes for Clinton just weren't there. Weren't for a long time.


PeteKent made me think of an 538-inspired project I worked on yesterday - an election night scorecard. (thanks PeteKent, now find a phonebooth and turn back into a rational non-koolaid-drinker)

These are the returns I am going to be interested in and when they come in:

Time State Electoral Votes
7:00 Indiana 11
7:00 Virginia 13
7:30 Ohio 20
8:00 Florida 27
8:00 Missouri 11
8:00 New Hampshire 4
8:30 North Carolina 15
9:00 Colorado 9
10:00 Nevada 5

By my way of thinking, McCain can only afford to lose NH or NV, but not both. My guess is by the poll closing times, the networks will not be able to call IN, VA, OH, FL, MO. Maybe they will call NH - we will see. If they call any of the first five for Obama, pop the corks, but I think the networks will be too cautious to do so until substatial numbers of returns come in.

I would love to see a more fleshed-out version of this as only Nate can do. Something that says "At X:00, if the networks call the XX race for Obama/McCain, you can expect YY and ZZ to follow"...

Cheers

I didn't capture the link to Radical Center's comment, but you should be aware of Nate at 538, he's a highly respected cruncher of poll numbers.