From Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog:

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight: Obama 303, Romney 235. “The model estimates that Mr. Romney would need to win the national popular vote by about one percentage point to avert a tossup, or a loss, in the Electoral College,” Silver writes.
Sam Wang, Princeton Election Consortium: Obama 303, Romney 235. “In terms of EV or the Meta-margin, [Obama has] made up just about half the ground he ceded to Romney after Debate #1.”
Drew Linzer, Emory University: Obama 326, Romney 212. “The accuracy of my election forecasts depend on the accuracy of the presidential polls,” Linzer writes. “As such, a major concern heading into Election Day is the possibility that polling firms, out of fear of being wrong, are looking at the results of other published surveys and weighting or adjusting their own results to match.”
…Larry Sabato, UVA Center for Politics: Obama 290, Romney 248. “Who could have imagined that a Frankenstorm would act as a circuit-breaker on the Republican’s campaign, blowing Romney off center stage for three critical days in the campaign’s last week, while enabling Obama to dominate as presidential comforter-in-chief, assisted by his new bipartisan best friend, Gov. Chris Christie (R)?”

From Mark Blumenthal at HuffPo Pollster:

The HuffPost Pollster tracking model created by Stanford political scientist Simon Jackman, which combines all available national and statewide polling data, finds that if polls fall within the historical ranges of polling accuracy, Obama stands a 91 percent chance of victory…If Obama wins every state in which the model currently shows him ahead (including the non-significant margin in Florida), he would win a total of 332 electoral votes, which is also the model’s median estimate.

From a phone interview with Emory University professor Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public:

Popular vote edge between 1 and 2 percent favoring President Obama, with 303 electoral votes

From TDS Founding Editor Stan Greenberg:

The final national survey for Democracy Corps shows Obama ahead with a 4-point lead in the presidential race, 49 to 45 percent (actually, 3.8 points to be exact)…The President has brought this back to the contours that gave him the lead before the debates – and that is enough to win, especially since he has a 7-point lead in the 12-state battleground for the presidency.

From Bob Dylan, via an AP report from his concert in Madison, WI:

Don’t believe the media. I think it’s going to be a landslide.

In his article, “Analysis: If Obama Wins, Thank Latino Voters,” at ABC News/Univision web page, TDS Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira explains why Latinos are such a pivotal constituency in this election:

…President Barack Obama looks set to surpass his 2008 performance among Latinos (67-31 or a margin of 36 points). An average of the last eight national polls of Latinos has him ahead by 70-22, a margin of 48 points. The final Latino Decisions tracking poll released Monday shows Obama with a 73-24 percent lead among Latinos, with Obama’s share being the largest ever for a presidential candidate. This strong support from Latinos seems likely to drive Obama’s overall support level among minorities this year close to the 80-percent level he received in 2008.
As for turnout, there will be 23.7 million eligible Hispanic voters this year, an increase of 22 percent over 2008. This has brought the Hispanic share of all eligible voters up to 11 percent, 1.5 percentage points higher than 2008. Recent data also indicates that Hispanic voter enthusiasm, after flagging early in the campaign, is now, if anything, higher than in 2008. This data suggests that the Latino share of voters in 2012 should go up relative to 2008, helping drive up the overall share of minority voters in the process.
…If the minority vote share in 2012 merely matches its 26 percent share in 2008, then Romney needs a 22-point margin among whites (better than any Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan) just to nose out Obama by two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote. And Obama likely will win the popular vote if he can get just 39 percent of the white vote (he got 43 percent in 2008).
But Latinos should help drive the minority vote even higher than its 2008 level. If the minority vote were to exceed expectations and reach 28 percent, Romney would need a 25-point margin among whites to prevail in the popular vote. He has been nowhere close to that level in polling during this campaign.

Teixeira goes on to explain why it’s not just the advantage Latinos provide for Obama nationwide; It’s also the powerful edger Hispanic voters provide in three key battlegound states:

…The first is Colorado, where the Hispanic share of eligible voters increased by about four percentage points to 15 percent of eligible voters, accounting for all the increase in the minority share of eligible voters in the state in the last four years. Colorado is extremely tight, with Obama leading the race by less than a percentage point, so victory for Obama probably depends on his campaign’s ability to mobilize this burgeoning population of Hispanic voters, who lean heavily to Obama, according to the polls.
The second is Nevada, where the state’s gain in the share of Latino eligible voters was essentially the same as Colorado’s, taking the overall Hispanic share of eligible voters up to 17 percent. But in Nevada, gains among other minorities–blacks, Asians and those of other race–were also strong. Indeed, between 2008 and 2012, the overall minority share of eligible voters increased by an astonishing nine points, more than two points a year. Minorities are now almost 40 percent of Nevada’s eligible voters. But within that group, Hispanics loom large, being the biggest component of the minority vote and currently favoring Obama by large margins. They are probably the key reason why Obama’s average lead in the state is now three points and he is a currently favored to take the state.
The third state is Florida. Florida had roughly a two-point growth in the share of Hispanic eligible voters between 2008 and 2012, taking the overall Hispanic share up to 18 percent, with growth driven by increases among relatively liberal non-Cuban Hispanics in the state. Another two-point increase was contributed by growth among African American, Asian and other race-eligible voters, making for a total four-point increase in the overall minority share of eligible voters. If Obama has any chance of taking the state (he is currently behind Romney by less than a percentage point), it will be due to mobilization of minority voters, especially the fast-growing Hispanic population.

Democrats have a lot to be grateful for in 2012. But President Obama’s embrace of the Latino community, along with the GOP’s Latino-bashing, may top the list.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
In 2000, our consulting firm helped put together a field operation in the South Florida Congressional race for a wonderful Democratic woman named Elaine Bloom.
We organized a terrific program – great voter identification – great get-out-the-vote. But in the end, Bloom lost by about 550 votes. They were the same 550 votes that cost Al Gore the Presidency of the United States.
In the end it didn’t matter that we had done a great job. What mattered was that if we had gotten just one more vote per precinct in the last half hour of that Election Day in 2000, Elaine Bloom would have gone to Congress – and George W. Bush would never have been President.
As you consider whether you should take the day off to knock on doors to re-elect Barack Obama – or whether after you have worked your heart out all day you will go out in the last ten minutes before the polls close to get that one last voter – remember what happened because we fell 550 votes short in Florida in 2000.
If Elaine Bloom and Al Gore had won those 550 additional votes:
There would never have been a War in Iraq. That would have saved the lives of five thousand Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s. It would have saved tens of thousands of Americans from being injured and maimed. It would have saved trillions of our dollars that could have been invested in building schools and roads and creating jobs. Our enemies would never have been able to create recruiting posters featuring the shame of Abu Ghraib or an Administration that embraced torture.
There would never have been the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that channeled trillions into the hands of the wealthiest one percent and – together with the Wars – wiped out the surplus left by Bill Clinton and created the worst federal deficit in American history.
There would never have been the Bush trickle down economic policies that created zero net private sector jobs – the worst record of jobs growth in 60 years.
Bush would never have had the opportunity to preside over Wall Street’s recklessness that sunk the American economy and created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Bush would never have been able to cut off all U.S. funding for family planning organizations around the world that use their own money to pay for abortions.
Those 550 votes had enormous, historic consequences.
So might the votes that are cast – or not cast – Tuesday.
The bottom line is simple. Your vote could be the vote that determines whether we have another War in Iraq – or go back to the trickle down policies that benefit only the wealthiest few and do nothing to create jobs.
You owe it to your kids. You owe it to your friends. You owe it to yourself.
Before the day is out. Make sure you have cast your vote. If necessary stand in line. Stay in line.
Make sure your wife or husband or adult kids vote. Make sure your mother and mother-in-law vote. Make sure the people you work with, or go to school with vote. Make sure that everyone you know goes to the poll and votes.
Don’t let Tuesday pass and look back and say: it was so close, I wish I had taken the time to vote – I wish I had volunteered to get that last handful of votes that would have changed history. It’s happened before – not long ago. Don’t let it happen again.

The following article by Democratic Strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Every D.C.-area Democrat I know not already deployed to various swing states around the country headed to northern VA for door-knocking this weekend, so figuring that they had plenty of volunteers, I decided to go to an equally important place I knew had a whole lot less, Pennsylvania. I have been worried about the closing gap in the PA polls, knowing that while the Obama campaign never took their field operation out of the state, they have still received generally less attention than VA, OH and the other most hotly contested states. My wife and I drove up to the Gettysburg area because being the old Midwesterner that I am, I love small town door-knocking.
The campaign was having us do a combination of voter ID and Get Out the Vote to those who were Obama supporters and, as it always is, it was fascinating. I think everyone who is in politicis full-time should make sure they go out and door-knock at least once or twice a cycle, because even though it isn’t scientific, you pick up a lot of important vibes about where people are coming from when you are knocking on their doors and talking to them in their homes. The towns we were in were blue collar, overwhelmingly white, modest single family homes with kids and dogs in most of them. There were lots of very Irish sounding names which, being a little bit Irish-American myself, was pretty fun.
One interesting and surprising thing I ran into was the number of people who were genuinely undecided. Most polls are showing only 2-3 percent undecided, but we were finding a a lot of people in these towns hanging back, unsure who they were going to vote for and actually glad to talk it through with us and get more information. If a pollster called them and pressed them to say who they were leaning toward, my gut is that many of the people we talked would have said Obama, but it wasn’t a done deal. People weren’t thinking Romney gave a damn about the middle class or their lives, and liked Obama better for the most part, but felt like things hadn’t been very good so were still open to change. The pro-Obama pitch we were giving about the president fighting for the middle class (and Romney definitely not being for the middle class) seemed to be working.
We did run into some Romney supporters, almost all of them were men. There was a big gender gap in this neighborhood, as many of the women told us they were voting for Obama but their husband would be voting for Romney.
It really felt good to be doing this, like we were making a difference.
You know, that’s how door-knocking always feels to me. I realized this weekend that I had been doing it now for 40 years. When I was 12-years-old, I went door to door in my Lincoln, NE neighborhood for George McGovern. It didn’t work, as Nixon won Nebraska that year with about 75 percent of the vote. But I was hooked and have been doing it in elections ever since. There is something about getting out there and looking people in the eye and talking about the election with them that makes you feel like you are making a difference and doing your part in America’s democracy. We are lucky to live in a country where people can freely, openly talk to their neighbors about politics without fear of being arrested or shot at. To be a part of that kind of civic interaction gives me joy, makes me feel like I am a part of the American story.
So if you are trying to decide tonight or tomorrow whether to get off your butt and get involved in turning out the vote, go do it. Every state has close races, and you can always get on the phone and do calling, as well. You won’t regret it, it will make you feel good, that you are doing your part in this great democracy we are living in, that you are helping to make sure your choice for president and senator and Congress gets in. And it matters: a few votes per precinct makes the difference in a whole lot of big elections. Make your voice heard, not just with your vote, but with your feet, your door-knocking knuckles, and your voice.

The following, vimeo by Stan Greenberg is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg Memo:
James and I are ready to put down our marker: President Obama is going to win re-election on Tuesday. Although many pundits are calling the race a tossup, our last national tracking survey shows the president clearly ahead. President Obama has all of the momentum, he holds leads in the key swing states, and he is on track to score a comfortable victory in the electoral college:

The following is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast (survey questionnaire here, graphs here):

The final national survey for Democracy Corps shows Obama ahead with a 4-point lead in the presidential race, 49 to 45 percent (actually, 3.8 points to be exact). This represents a slight improvement since our last poll, which fielded before the final presidential debate, when we had Obama ahead by 2 points among all voters but tied among the smaller likely electorate. With the enthusiasm gap narrowed and Obama almost back to 2008 levels of support with the new Democratic base of unmarried women and minorities, the President has brought this back to the contours that gave him the lead before the debates – and that is enough to win, especially since he has a 7-point lead in the 12-state battleground for the presidency.
Obama closes this race with more voters saying they approve of him and the direction he is taking the country. More than half of all likely voters (52 percent) approve of the President’s job performance and warm feelings toward him are up 3 points. This survey also finds more optimism about the country–42 percent now say the country is headed in the right direction and warm feelings about the economy are up 3 points.
Romney still has an enthusiasm advantage: 59 percent of his voters say they are following the race very closely, compared to 52 percent of Obama’s. But as we have seen in some other polls, Obama’s voters have become much more certain of their preference – Obama ‘loyalists’ are up 4 points to 42 percent – reflecting a 5-point advantage over Romney in loyalist support.
Romney maintains a 3-point advantage on the economy and has kept Obama’s youth vote under 60 percent. He is winning two-to-one among white non-college voters, with Obama’s vote at 32 percent and below 2008. Romney has a 4-point lead among independents.
Despite the day-to-day battles, Romney is being pushed back by his own party’s brand: Obama has a 7-point advantage on warm feelings over Romney (53 percent to 46 percent); the Democratic Party is 7 points more popular than the Republican Party; and the Democrats in Congress have a 6-point advantage over the Republican Congress in favorability(39 to 33 percent).
The keys to Obama’s lead going into tomorrow’s vote include:
· The new Democratic base (Rising American Electorate) gives Obama 65 percent (4 points short of 2008).
· Unmarried women are now voting 66 percent for Obama (4 points short of 2008).
· Obama’s higher approval is pushed up by a 20-point advantage on ‘having the better temperament to deal with a natural disaster.’ Two-thirds are more confident of the government’s ability to handle a natural disaster now compared to Katrina.
And, for the record, voters reached on a cell phone supported Obama by 10 points, while the landline respondents gave Obama only a 1-point lead.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.
She was born in a country where women couldn’t vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant – especially among the country’s oldest citizens.
Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college – or even graduated from high school – a country were hardly anyone was considered “middle class.” It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.
Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law – a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.
Bea was born in the United States of America.
Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time – movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.
She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.
She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.
Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans – watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.
She was part of the women’s movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women – as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.
This year, Bea – at 95 years old – is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She’s right.
Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.
Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself – and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn’t flinch when it came to destroying other people’s jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.
Now his “investors” are the oligarchs of the Republican Right -people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.
These people – and their Tea Party allies in Congress – have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for – on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.
They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.

Read more…

From Drew Westen’s New York Times article, “America’s Leftward Tilt?“:

…Whichever candidate wins, the first order of business will be deciding which programs to cut — unless a deal to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff is reached during the lame-duck session of Congress after the election. Most voters intuitively understand that jobs and deficits are linked — too much of an emphasis on deficits leads to too few jobs — because working people with money in their wallets drive demand, whereas wealthier people with money in their wallets drive Jaguars (and send the rest of their income to their hedge fund managers). Even in the heart of red America, people understand that high unemployment and income disparities of the magnitude we are now witnessing are bad for economic growth.
But you have to speak in a way that brings out their inner Keynes, as I discovered when testing the following message in the Deep South: “The only way to cut the deficit is to put Americans back to work.” That message beat the toughest austerity message by over 30 points.
The reality is that our government hasn’t become this dysfunctional because the parties are so “polarized.” It’s because there is only one pole in American politics today, and its magnetic field is so powerful that it has drawn both parties in the same direction — rightward. And it is in that same direction that the magnetic field of contemporary American politics is likely to pull the stories the two parties tell after the election — and the policies the winner pursues.
The data, however, suggest just the opposite — that both candidates have benefited in the general election every time they have taken a left turn. President Obama was in deep political trouble 15 months ago when he cut the closest thing he could to a “grand bargain” with House Speaker John A. Boehner to slash the federal budget by trillions, and he did nothing for his popularity nine months earlier when he extended the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Not until he began talking like a populist did he begin picking up steam in the polls. Indeed, one of the most powerful messages the Democrats chose not to use in the 2010 midterm elections — which would have supported a policy that was extremely popular then and remains as popular now — was a simple message on taxes I tested nationally, which won in every region and with every demographic, including Tea Partyers: “In tough times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.” Once that position (and other populist appeals) became central to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, the election looked like it would be a rout.

Westen goes on to note that a leftward tilt — from the hard right towards the center — also helped Romney: “For both men, a pragmatic left-hand turn helped them steer their way toward a middle class desperate for hope.” Westen argues that there is always a powerful pull to the right driven by cash infusions into politics. Yet only by embracing progressive policies can presidential candidates win broad popular support. As Westen concludes, “In other words, if the candidate who wins takes a left turn like the one that won him the presidency, the Reagan era would finally be over. We can only hope.”

Here’s the key section of today’s editorial in the WaPo:

THROUGH ALL THE flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.
How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers — the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.
How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.
The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see: Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda. Mr. Romney promised to replace the Affordable Care Act but never said with what. He promised an alternative to President Obama’s lifeline to young undocumented immigrants but never deigned to describe it.
And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong…
…[Romney] seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong.

The following article by Democratic Strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been doing politics full time for over 30 years now, and in most of those elections, even the full-time pols with great insider polling and analysis to look at had some big surprises when the results came in. Sometimes these surprises were on individual races, but much of the time, they were on the overall election pattern.
In 1980, my first election year working politics, most of the experts said the Presidential race would be tight, and no one predicted the kind of tide that swept in a Republican Senate. In 1984, everyone rightly predicted the Reagan landslide, but few people thought that two of the most openly progressive Senators elected in the last half century (Tom Harkin and Paul Simon) would buck the trend and upset Republican incumbents in the Senate. In 1986, few experts predicted the Democrats would win most of the close races and retake the Senate. In 1990, pundits were surprised by the level of backlash against (the first) Bush and the number of seats Democrats picked up. In 1992, most politicos predicted Perot would fade in the end- few thought he would get 19 percent of the vote. In 1994, the experts knew Democrats would have a bad year, but almost no one predicted the Republicans would win both houses of Congress. In 1998, with the Lewinsky scandal looming over the political landscape, most predictions were for Republican pick-ups of 20 to 30 House seats; when the Democrats instead picked up 5, embarrassed Republicans stripped Newt Gingrich of his Speakership. In 2000, The Bush team was so confident going into election weekend that they were having Bush campaigning for other Republicans — they never expected the high levels of African-American turnout that caused the close election in FL and meant that most other swing states went for Gore. In 2004, everyone was blown away by the high levels of Republican base turnout, in swing states and nationwide, that not only allowed Bush to win but swept in several new Republican Senators. In 2006 and 2008 both, people generally knew it was going to be a Democratic year, but almost no one predicted that Democrats would win almost every close Senate race and go from 45 to 51 in 2006, and 51 to 60 in 2008. And in 2010, everyone knew there would be a strong Republican tide, but few predicted that it would be so historically big that it would mean a 63 seat pick-up in the House.
If you look at the patterns in all these elections, it isn’t that the polling is necessarily so far off or that the predictions get all the big things wrong. But in politics, a little change here and a little change there can mean a big difference. It’s why no matter how expert you are that no one in this business is ever 100 percent on the mark. Very modest changes in who turns out and how different demographic groups break really matter, and even a last-minute change of 1 percent can swing a whole bunch of elections. Remember too that polling is always 24-48 hours behind what is actually happening in the real world, which if something is starting to move really matters. And polling, of course, doesn’t do a very good job of measuring on-the-ground field ops effectiveness.
One other factor which has an impact on the surprise thing is an intangible which is hard to measure or account for in advance, or even figure out why after the election in the post-mortem: in many election cycles, one party or another wins most of the close races. And it doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with which party is having the better year overall. To add to the complication factor, in several recent cycles, one party has won most of the close Senate races and the other most of the close House races: in 2006, for example, which was a very Democratic year overall, we Dems won every close Senate seat but one, yet lost over 60 percent of the closest House races- even though we picked up 31 seats and won back the House, we still left more seats than we should have on the table. If they are the ones to win, party committees will sometimes argue that that their superior field and communications operations were the reasons they won the close ones, but I have never seen any hard evidence of that one way or another. I am sure there is a lot of random luck to the whole phenomena. But I will say this: in most of the elections of the last few cycles, the party having a better year won at least most of the close Senate races. 2010, where Ds and Rs split the closest races, was actually the big exception. In 2002 and 2004, the Republicans won most of the closest races; in 2000, 2006, and 2008, Democrats won most of the closest.
So will 2012 give us some surprises? Almost certainly. The thing about surprises is that they are hard to predict, but the biggest surprise for me would be an election result that looked exactly like the current polling and prognostication predicts.
My great fear, naturally, is that Gallup and Rasmussen could put all the other pollsters to shame, the undecideds could all break against the incumbent, and Romney could end up winning by several percentage points and sweeping in a Republican Senate. But I am feeling optimistic today, so my guess is that the surprises could very well be on our side of the ledger.
One gut feeling I have is that we may end up a little further ahead nationally and in most of the swing states than it now looks. I tend to agree with Greenberg’s argument on cell phones being under-polled in a lot of the national polling; I tend to think that with so many of the undecided voters being young unmarried women, we have a good shot at getting more of them in the end than Romney does; I continue to think our field operation is out-performing Romney’s; and the great job that Obama is doing re disaster relief may help him in the end as well. If even 2 or 3 of those hunches turn out to be true, we could win the national popular vote by 4 points, and most of the swing states by at least that much; if all 4 of them are true, we could be looking at a final margin of 5 points.
When it comes to the Senate, the biggest question in my mind, the thing that could turn into a surprise, is if one party or another, for whatever mysterious set of reasons, ends up winning most of the closest races. Given that there are now 15 races considered by both parties to be competitive, a strong trend by either party in winning the close ones will be a big deal. One other thing to add here: if Obama does end up with a 4-5 point victory, that will almost certainly help some Dem Senate candidates win close races.
The biggest surprise of all according to Conventional Wisdom would be the Democrats winning the House. I am not going to predict that one — I am not that much of an optimist. The money that Rove and Co. are spending on House races makes that scenario very tough. But this scenario is not as impossible as the CW would have it. If my optimistic hunch about Obama turns out to be right and he is winning by 4 or 5, that will definitely give Dem House candidates in close races a boost. And a superior field operation for Obama in FL, NC, VA, NH, PA, OH, MI, MN, IA, CO, and NV could well bring several House seats home. In the end, Democratic House candidates will have to win over 60 percent of the closest races to pull this off, but that isn’t out of the question.
One final note that gives a Democratic surprise scenario a little more hope: we continue to win the basic argument in this race. Romney has had to move our way rhetorically, the tea partiers have been forced on their heels. On the issues and on values, we are winning this year’s debate.
Wouldn’t that be amazing if after all this talk of the closest election ever, Democrats ended up with a major trifecta sweep? Yeah, I know, I’m being more than a little optimistic here. But a boy can dream, can’t he? And I guarantee you, having lived through big surprise elections like 1980, 1994, 1998, 2000: stranger things have definitely happened.