The religious fervor for these poll analyses demonstrated by otherwise non-religious posters (and I have no idea who those are, specifically) is intriguing.

The interesting thing about NH according to RCP is that Obama is close to an all time high in % of voters for this election.

The "512 Paths to the White House" is a great little tool.

some pundit on Twitter today claimed THIS Ohio poll was the one the insiders were watching closest, based on track record:

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/11/04/dispatch-poll-shows-ohio-a-toss-up.html

has it Obama 50, Romney 48, not sure I make anyone completely happy with that info but I guess the Romneyiacs will like it better...

A Newspaper poll by Susquehanna Polling & Research has Pennsylvania tied 47-47. If Pennsylvania is anywhere near that close, Obama would be in big trouble.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama heads toward Election Day with an apparent lead over Republican Mitt Romney among early voters in key states that could decide the election.

Obama's advantage, however, isn't as big as the one he had over John McCain four years ago, giving Romney's campaign hope that the former Massachusetts governor can erase the gap when people vote on Tuesday.

More than 27 million people already have voted in 34 states and the District of Columbia. No votes will be counted until Election Day but several battleground states are releasing the party affiliation of people who have voted early.

So far, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio – five states that could decide the election, if they voted the same way. Republicans have the edge in Colorado, which Obama won in 2008.

Regarding setting up generators for gas stations, I'm not an electrician and don't have any experience with generators but I don't think gasoline pumps are simply things you could switch plugs with. If electrical work is needed I would t want something done hastily especially around flammable liquids.

I keep thinking Romney has an edge in Virginia. He doesn't.

Gallup is now tentatively planning on conducting interviewing over the last four days of this week, Thursday through Sunday, to provide a final pre-election estimate of the election race. The decisions we make on the validity of the sample and the analysis of the data that results will be carefully informed by the degree of recovery from the storm over the period of the survey.

There was a big Gary Johnson pitch here this weekend, hadn't really heard much about him locally before now. As of today, I have seen more Johnson signs than I have Obama or Romney ones.

BTW, I hate hearing this "dead heat" crap in the press and the "over" stuff here. I'm very, very nervous.

Just to add evidence for the closeness of the race, new polls today have PA and MI tied,

Vibe feels like "if his numbers are wrong, blame the polls" yet not accompanied with a lot along the lines of "Nate, like a quarterback, will get too much blame if he's inaccurate and too much credit if he's accurate."

But even if Nate said it would be 54-46 in June (he didn't) and Obama wins 54-46 (he won't) - even then it would be.... a correlation.

But 'Obama wins' is a binary issue, 100 pct or 0.

The problem with much of the Silver criticism isn't that you can't make valid criticisms of his models and results its that much of the actual complaints being hurled in his direction. Are stupid.

If Romney wins, then any national polls that showed Romney winning the popular vote (assuming he wins that, too) are the "winners". And any swing state polls that showed him winning (assuming he wins those states) are also the "winners". And Emperor Joe and snapper are the new BTF Royal Couple, and can ask Susquehanna who gets to wear the pants and who has to wear the dress.

And if that's the case, then the losers are the national and polls that missed, and the aggregating models that relied too much on those polls

But 'Obama wins' is a binary issue, 100 pct or 0.

But even if Nate said it would be 54-46 in June (he didn't) and Obama wins 54-46 (he won't) - even then it would be.... a correlation.
Could have been that it really was 50-50 then, but the populace changed its collective minds over time, and wound up getting to the 54-46. Would Nate deserve credit in that scenario?

Let's put it this way: If Romney wins, won't you then tell us that Nate WAS right back then, but the polls screwed up at the end, so it's their fault?

what DOES Nate have to lose in your view, should Romney win?

But even if Nate said it would be 54-46 in June (he didn't) and Obama wins 54-46 (he won't) - even then it would be.... a correlation.
Could have been that it really was 50-50 then, but the populace changed its collective minds over time, and wound up getting to the 54-46. Would Nate deserve credit in that scenario?

Entering this election cycle, did anyone think Silver would turn into one of the biggest non-politician stars?

“If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy

“If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy

“Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps,” Rove said. The storm, he told the Post, was “the October surprise. For once, the October surprise was a real surprise.”

...."If the Obama campaign spent half the time trying to get people back to work as they do spinning reporters on why they’re going to win this election, the unemployment rate might not have gone up," said Rich Beeson, the Romney campaign's political director. "That said, it doesn’t matter how many offices you have, staff you hire, or ground game plans you have -– you need a candidate who can tell the American people why things will be better, not worse, after four years of their leadership."

That may not be completely true. The apparatus that each campaign uses to bring out voters in the next 72 hours seems likely to determine the election. And the Obama campaign does seem well positioned. In Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada, the president's aides claim to have brought out 1.4 million voters who didn't cast ballots during the midterm elections compared with 840,000 non-midterm Republican voters. These "sporadic" voters are vital to erasing the supposed-enthusiasm gap that Obama has suffered in the polls.

In addition, this weekend, the president's campaign is deploying an army of volunteers to help ensure that as many supporters as possible cast votes. Campaign manager Jim Messina said there would be 5,100 Get Out The Vote stations in battleground states operational on Tuesday. In addition, the campaign has commitments from 700,000 volunteers to do GOTV shifts before the election.

"Unlike campaigns of the past, our volunteers are not driving to some large office miles from their homes and handed a phone and a call sheet," the memo concludes. "Instead, Canvass Captains, Phone Bank Captains and scores of local volunteers will be knocking on the doors of the very voters they registered, have been talking to for months and know personally. And they will be directing them to polling locations in their communities – the schools their kids go to, the places of worship they attend each week and community centers they know well."

Instead, Canvass Captains, Phone Bank Captains and scores of local volunteers will be knocking on the doors of the very voters they registered, have been talking to for months and know personally.

That sounds awful. It's bad enough being bothered by campaigns right around the election, but to be confronted with it for months by people who are trying to fake a personal connection just so they can get you to vote?

The problem is that there's no way to grade Nate, whether the number is 15% or 25% or 35%. You know, it's possible that what Nate is claiming he can do do can't be done to any reasonable degree.

IN the razor-thin 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy campaigned in 49 states. Richard M. Nixon visited all 50.

The current contest is just as close and intense, but the candidates have campaigned in only 10 states since the political conventions. There are towns in Ohio that have received more attention than the entire West Coast. ...

Some of the people who live in the nation’s spectator states return the favor by staying home from the polls. In 2008, voter turnout in the 15 states that received the bulk of the candidates’ attention was 67 percent. In the remaining 35 states, it was six points lower.

That disparity increases the chances that one candidate will prevail in the Electoral College while another wins the popular vote. Polling experts believe Mitt Romney has a greater chance than President Obama of being on the losing end of that combination, by running up large margins in states dominated by Republican voters while losing most of the competitive ones.

Rob Richie, the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, said the new political landscape would be unrecognizable to a voter a few decades ago. “Back in ’76,” he said, “10 of the 11 biggest states were swing states.”

Indeed, in the extremely close 1960 and 1976 presidential elections, there were more than 30 contested states, including California, Illinois, New York and Texas.

The 2004 election, in which President George W. Bush gained a second term, was about as close as the one in 1976, which Jimmy Carter won. Both candidates prevailed in the overall vote by about two percentage points. In 1976, though, 20 states were won or lost by a margin of less than five percentage points. In 2004, only 11 states were within that margin.

In the current election, the battleground has grown almost comically small. Just three states — Florida, Ohio and Virginia — have accounted for almost two-thirds of the recent campaign appearances by the presidential candidates and their running mates. The three are home to an eighth of the nation’s people.

Four years ago, the presidential candidates and their supporters bought television advertising in about 100 of the 210 media markets, said Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. This year, she said, “the battlefield has shrunk by one-third to one-half.”

In Cincinnati, the signs of the showdown are everywhere — not just from the campaigns, but also from a vast array of groups that have descended, knocking on the doors of residents so exhausted by all the knocks that one resident warded off more by posting an announcement on her front door that she had voted early and was, thank you very much, done.

The fight is bitter, with reports of yard signs stolen, run over and even set afire, political phone calls so endless that at least one man was answering his home telephone by barking “Romney” rather than hello, and tales of front-door confrontations ending in curse words or worse.

“There’s nothing coming in this house that has the word ‘Obama’ on it,” one man told Liz Ping, an Obama volunteer, when she appeared at a doorstep. After the two disagreed over who ought to be blamed for the nation’s debt, Ms. Ping, who is 61 and retired, was chased from the porch and down the driveway, she recalled.

“We’re the tip of the spear,” she said.

One rejected Romney door knocker said, “I just tell them, ‘You can run me out of here, but somebody will be back next week unless you vote.’ ” ...

It is the most expensive and technically sophisticated campaign in American history. But in the end, after months of work, after hundreds of hours of commercials and hundreds of thousands of front-porch visits and millions of telephone calls — after focus groups, fliers, yard signs and rallies — Shelley and Dennis Russell are unmoved.

Days before the polls open they are still undecideds, targets in the cross hairs of a yearlong political cannonade who somehow, miraculously have yet to be persuaded by either side.

Yet on closer inspection, it is no miracle. To the contrary, they personify the angst that defines the dying days of this especially bitter contest, an emotion that the campaigns have longed to capitalize on, but have never captured.

The Russells live with their three children in a white clapboard house in Blue Ash, in middle-class east Cincinnati. She is a payroll supervisor; he works for a towing company. Their oldest son, 18, heads to boot camp next February because military service will pay for a college education that his family cannot afford.

Their pay is steady, but even low inflation has eaten away their income. They wonder openly whether the system is broken. They say they doubt either candidate can fix it.

Mr. Obama, they say, is honest and has good ideas, but no spine to carry them out. “Obama says he’s going to put more out for education,” said Mr. Russell, who wants to improve his skills but lacks money for more schooling. “But like his medical plan, I highly doubt that what comes out the other end is going to be what went in.

“If you’re willing as a leader to say, I’ll get 100 percent — oh, I’ll take 60 — you’re not accomplishing what you set out to do. Do you really believe he’s going to do it in next four years?”

Mr. Romney might run the country better, they say, but he is clueless about the average person’s needs. Witness, Ms. Russell said, his comments about the 47 percent of Americans who pay no taxes or depend on government handouts. “Me personally, I’ve never been on public assistance,” she said. “But I definitely have friends who are single mothers who could not go to work without it.

“To me, it shows he’s in a different wage bracket than the rest of us,” she said.

Mr. Russell scoffed at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that children should borrow from their parents to pay college tuition instead of seeking government loans. It is a notion, he said, that only someone with wealthy parents would propose.

Then again, Ms. Russell said: “I don’t know that that will make him worse than Obama — that he can do enough good that it will trickle down to us.”

The Russells concede that their indecision is not for lack of information. Like virtually every family in Ohio, they have watched the debates, talked with friends and read the material hung on their doorknobs, although they have drawn the line at listening to robo-calls. In short, they have been drenched by a fire hose of creative persuasion of the quality and volume that only two billion-dollar campaigns could muster.

Still, Ms. Russell mused, it is not altogether clear what this monumental ground game has added up to.

“I think this is one of those races that could go either way,” she said. “They both have enough money backing them.

“If they’d put some of that money to work instead, it’d be amazing.”

Mostly Mr. [Glenn] Beck has helped Mr. Romney by directly addressing his devout Mormon faith, something the candidate himself rarely does. “I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day,” Mr. Beck said recently on his radio program. “I believe he is being guided.” He has also said that a Romney victory would be “a sign from God.”

Mr. Romney already enjoys a commanding lead among white evangelical Protestant voters — 76 percent to 17 percent for President Obama, according to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey released on Monday, and 54 percent to Mr. Obama’s 39 percent among Protestant voters. Influential Christian leaders including the Rev. Billy Graham and Ralph Reed have endorsed Mr. Romney.

But deep-rooted tensions between Mormons and evangelical Christians persist, and could affect the turnout on Tuesday, several evangelical leaders said.

“Romney has staked out issues that are aligned with evangelicals,” said Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the conservative nonprofit American Family Association. But, he added, Mr. Romney’s faith may ultimately present a problem in the voting booth. “It’s still an issue for some evangelicals and may influence their voting decision on Nov. 6,” he said. “There are a number of evangelicals who will not vote for someone who doesn’t adhere to orthodox Christianity.”

When Mitt Romney's 2012 candidacy was gaining traction in the primaries, the conventional wisdom instantly conveyed that the evangelical vote, skeptical of Mormonism, would sink him.

What if in Ohio next week the opposite is true? There and in other swing states—Wisconsin, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida—the evangelical vote is flying beneath the media's radar. It's a lot of voters not to notice. In the 2008 presidential vote, they were 30% of the vote in Ohio, 31% in Iowa and 26% in Wisconsin.

Back in April, the policy director of the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Land, predicted that evangelicals in time would coalesce behind Mitt Romney. Yesterday he endorsed Mr. Romney, the first time he has done so for any presidential candidate.

Ralph Reed, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, has been spending a lot of time in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the belief that evangelical support for Mr. Romney could be decisive. He notes that when George W. Bush won Ohio in 2004, the Kerry camp thought their dominance of Democratic Cuyahoga County around Cleveland had the state locked up. But Mr. Bush's solid support in evangelical-dominated counties from Cincinnati to the West Virginia border carried Ohio by two percentage points. ...

Mr. Reed notes that in several opinion polls—NBC, Pew and ABC—the percentage of evangelicals claiming to support Mr. Romney has been in the mid-70s. "We estimate that in 2008 there were 350,000 evangelicals who didn't vote in Ohio," Mr. Reed says. "Obama carried the state by 260,000." If that support of 70% or more holds for Mr. Romney in Ohio, and if the share of the evangelical vote increases by a point or two, then the challenger could carry the Buckeye State. ...

Four years ago, evangelicals mainly supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. When John McCain became the nominee, he and the evangelical community never connected, and many evangelicals stayed home. This time they are in motion. ...

[The president of Ohio Christian University, Mark A.] Smith says that if evangelicals in Ohio's rural communities repeat their turnout levels from 2000 and 2004, they will offset the Obama advantage in Cuyahoga County. "Six different faith groups are out there" for Romney in Ohio, he says. "That didn't happen the last time."

Mr. Smith and others I spoke to this week cited one more reason for their enthusiasm: Paul Ryan. Steve Scheffler, a longtime GOP activist in Iowa, says it was "the best possible choice" Mr. Romney could make for the ticket. "It galvanized evangelicals."

1479: Argh. That doesn't give me a number. That's pretty wishy-washy on his part.

The problem is that there's no way to grade Nate, whether the number is 15% or 25% or 35%. You know, it's possible that what Nate is claiming he can do do can't be done to any reasonable degree.

The fight is bitter, with reports of yard signs stolen, run over and even set afire,

1479: Argh. That doesn't give me a number. That's pretty wishy-washy on his part.

Ugh, a SuperPAC ad just aired. If you haven't decided who you are voting for by now, you're the biggest idiot ever.

The folks who run these PACs and Committees have consultants who place the ads, they have houses who make the ads. It’s all a pretty open secret that these things work very incestuously and by hook or by crook the folks running running these organizations get a big big taste of the action themselves. So you may be wondering if that Romney SuperPAC ad running non-stop in Chicago and Dallas isn’t money going to waste. But I guarantee you that the commissions being made off that spending amount to blindingly large bonanzas for the people actually running these outfits.

In addition, Nate's really good for primaries.

3) But mostly they're just grifters.
...
It’s all a pretty open secret that these things work very incestuously and by hook or by crook the folks running running these organizations get a big big taste of the action themselves.

With a race this close, any prediction is literally a guess.

With a race this close, any prediction is literally a guess.