Who Are You Going to Believe, a Bookie or a Disreputable Creep Like Dick Morris

In recent days Michael Barone, George Will and the incomparable Dick Morris have all predicted that Mitt Romney will be elected President, and by a significant margin.  Mr. Will even has him carrying Minnesota, a state that has not voted Republican since 1972, when Nixon beat George McGovern in 49 states. Karl Rove has also predicted a Romney win, albeit my more modest margins.  Mr. Rove after all has to raise a lot of money every two years, and it helps to not completely shoot your credibility when you ask people to trust you with their money.

If you know someone that also believes that Mitt Romney is going to win tomorrow, please encourage them to wager on it.  Google led me to a web site where one could bet $100 on Romney and collect  $295 if he should be elected tomorrow night.  To bet on the President being re-elected, you would have to risk $340, just to win $100 if he wins.

Bookmakers make a profit by minimizing their risk.  Political pundits get paid to please an audience.  The bookmaker's goal is to minimize risk by having equal amounts of money ride on either outcome.  So a 3 to 1 betting line reflects the real actions taken by actual bettors with their own money.  That should influence your thinking, whether the result is one that you wish for, or not.

Nate Silver's prediction model, which correctly predicted every state except for Indiana last time, and has correctly predicted all but one of the last 60-odd Senate elections, predicts that the President's re-election is 92.2% probable.  The Intrade Future Market has the President's re-election at 67.3% likely.

My official 2012 Presidential Prediction:

• Barack Obama 50.2%/303 Electoral Votes
• Mitt Romney 48.4%/235 Electoral Votes
• Gary Johnson 0.9%
• Jill Stein 0.4%
• Virgil Goode and assorted eccentrics: 0.1%

303 Electoral Votes represents the President winning every jurisdiction he carried except for IN, Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, NC and FL.

A few days ago I wrote a post about how to follow the electoral math on election night.  It considered nine states in play.  But today I find it very unlikely that Romney can win NV or WI.  I also think he can't win without taking NC, the only swing state where he is a significant favorite.  Reducing the variables to these six states, the math becomes even simpler.

The President has 253 likely Electoral Votes and his challenger has 206.  With 79 EV to be determined on Election Day, Barack Obama needs to win only 17 of them.  He can get there just by winning Ohio or Florida.  Or Virginia and one more state among NH, CO, or IA.   One last path to 270 would involve losing OH, Fl and VA, but sweeping NH, CO and IA.

So I'm confident.  Not because I want the President to be elected, but because the available evidence tells me that he is likely to.

Romney Has 5 Paths to 270 (and one to 269)

The Presidential race is 4 days away and the President has a pretty clear upper hand in his re-election effort, but Mitt Romney has several paths to winning the election.

Here are my assumptions: The outcome of 41 states plus the District of Columbia can be predicted with at least confidence.* President Obama can bank on winning a minimum of 237 Electoral Votes (EV) while Mitt Romney is assured of 191.  Romney therefore needs to win 79 EV out of the 110 EV in the nine states that might be carried by either candidate. I think that any path Romney might have to 270 involves him winning North Carolina (15 EV).  So for the scenarios below, we'll say that he starts with 206 EV and consider eight states up for grabs, and I would put them into two categories based on their number of electoral votes:

Three Large Swing States: Florida (29 EV), Ohio (18), and Virginia (13),
Five Small Swing States, Wisconsin (10), Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4).

The winner of the election will largely be determined by how the Large Swing States go.  Keep these scenarios in mind as you watch the results come in on Tuesday.

1.  If Romney wins Florida, Ohio and Virginia:
If he wins all 3 of the Large Swing States, he will have 266 EV and will need to win just one Small Swing State.

2.  If Romney wins FL and OH but not VA:
He will have 253 votes and can be elected by:
A. Wining WI and CO.
B.  Winning WI or CO  if he also wins two of the other Small Swing States: (IA, NV, NH).

3.  If Romney wins FL and VA but not OH:
He starts with 248 EV and can be elected by:
A. Winning CO and WI plus one other Small Swing States (IA, NV, or NH).
B.  Winning WI or CO if he also wins NV and IA.
Note: if he wins CO, IA and NV, then he gets a 269-269 tie, which would mean Romney being elected President and Joe Biden remaining Vice-President under the provisions of the 12th Amendment.


4. If Romney wins OH and VA but not FL:
He starts with 237 and must sweep all five Small Swing States.

5. If Romney wins FL, but loses OH and VA:
He starts with 235 and must win all five Small Swing States.

Winning just OH or VA while losing the other two Large Swing States does not present any way for Romney to get to 270.

As long as Romney wins NC, he has several permutations to get  over the line.  But every time one of those remaining eight swing states gets colored blue, he loses an "out". If these swing states provide 33 EV for the President, the election is over.



* President Obama could pull an upset in Nebraska's 2nd Congressional district.  This is unlikely to occur and very unlikely to determine the winner, although it could avoid the 269-269 tie scenario discussed above in Section 3B.

Electoral Math

This election will be very close.  I will be very surprised if the difference in the popular vote is greater than 2 percent.  And there are plausible scenarios for each candidate to win.  But the President is a clear betting favorite, despite consistently trailing in the Likely Voter model of the two most well known daily tracking polls.


Nate Silver's forecasting model is the best evidence for why the President remains the betting favorite.  Silver has become quasi-famous in this cycle and his track record justifies his status as the go-to prognosticator for political forecasting.  In 2008 his popular vote prediction was off by just 1 point.  And he correctly predicted every jurisdiction except for Indiana and Nebraska's 2nd congressional district.  In the last 2 congressional races he has correctly predicted all but one Senate race.

Silver is a Democrat and he has (predictably) become a target of some right wing bloggers who claim bias in his forecasting.  But what's most interesting about his track record is that almost all of his incorrect predictions were very close and none exhibit a bias against Republicans.  In 2008, he thought Barack Obama would win the popular vote by 6.1 points.  He won by 7.2.  And Indiana and NE-2 were both carried by the President.  The only Senate race he has gotten wrong was Alaska in 2008.  There he predicted the Republican nominee to win, but the race ultimately went to a more moderate Republican winning as a write-in candidate.  So none of his (very few) mistakes involved mistakes in favor of the Democratic party.

Silver currently projects that the President will win the popular vote by a point and a half.  He projects that the President will lose Indiana, North Carolina, Florida and Nebraska-02.  Every other locality will be carried by the same party that won them in 2008.  This would result in an electoral college tally of 303 for Obama, 235 for Mitty Romney.

So how does Mitt get to 270?  Well, it would take a number of upsets in specific states.  Here is a breakdown of the states where Romney is most likely to score an upset:

1. Colorado, 9 Electoral Votes, 42.3% chance of a Romney win.  This gets him to 244.
2. Virginia, 13 EV, 40.2%.  These two get him up to 257.
3. New Hampshire, 4 EV, 29.5%.  Now he's up to 261.
4. Iowa, 6 EV, 27.7%.  Up to 267....still needs one more upset.
5. Ohio, 18 EV, 26.5%. Now he crosses the line with 285 Electoral Votes.

If Romney pulls all five of these upsets, and avoids being upset in Florida (36.2% chance of an Obama win) he will be the Next President of the united states.  Put differently, he would need to win every state that he has at least a 25% of winning in order to be elected.

The odds of pulling all five upsets are quite long.  If you multiply each of these probabilities, you find that there is a less than one percent chance of pulling all 5 upsets. But this is a somewhat misleading number because the outcome of these states are not completely discreet events as the voters there will be influenced by similar forces, such as the tenor of the news for the next nine days, the jobs report that comes out on Friday and of course, the weather, which could drive turnout up or down significantly.

And Romney could also win Wisconsin (10 EV, 13.7% chance for Romney), which would allow him to lose several of the above states and still get to 270, assuming he doesn't also lose North Carolina.  (13 EV, 17.5% chance for the President).

So the President is not 99 to 1 favorite.  But he is about a three to one favorite.

The Questions I Would Have Asked at the Debate

Last week I came up with three questions for each candidate at the town hall meeting.  Only one of the six was actually asked.  These are the questions I would have asked, if I had the opportunity.

For Mitt Romney:

1.  In your convention speech you said that business experience was the "basic qualification" for being President and you blamed a lot of his failures on this fact.  Why then did you choose Paul Ryan, a man with absolutely no business experience to be your running mate?

2.  You have said that you would build three new submarines a year for the next 10 years.  These additional submarines would add at least $75 billion to our deficit.  What strategic purpose would these additional boats serve?

3.  (This one was actually covered, more or less.)  Your tax plan calls for a twenty-percent across the board reduction in all income tax brackets but does not specify a single deduction that you would eliminate to pay for these cuts.  Why are you being so specific about the benefits and so vague about the costs?

For President Obama

1. With the exception of reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, your drug policies are more or less the same as your predecessors.  What specific changes in drug policy will you implement in a second term?

2.  Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was intentionally killed under your orders by a drone in 2011.  What policies have you put in place to ensure that no one will be denied due process during the process of adding names to this list.

3.  The American public remains very divided on whether or not Climate Change is caused by humans.  What steps will you take to convince the public of the science behind this problem and how will this influence your energy policies?

  

Will Romney Gamble Tonight?

And I don't mean a repeat of the ham-fisted 10K bet with Governor Perry.  Even he learns from some of his mistakes.

But the present situation is that Romney is behind.  And he knows it.  Ordinarily I would expect a candidate in that position to do something bold-announce a new initiative or launch a heretofore undisclosed attack on something substantive.

But I don't think Mr. Romney will go that way.  I think he is by nature a truly conservative man, and he seems to still believe that people will eventually understand that the incumbent President is roughly as terrible as Mitt believes him to be.

But I also think the President is, in this sense, a conservative man.  And he has the lead.  So I would be very surprised if he was anything other than cautious.

This has the makings of a boring night.  But I can almost guarantee that tomorrow each side will be harping on at least one moment and blowing its importance out of the water.

I think the post-debate polls will be mixed.  There won't be a clear winner.  But over the next few days, Romney will probably rise a little bit, just by virtue of having been on the stage with the President and not embarrassing himself.

It's 2 hours and 40 minutes until show time and the President's re-election chances are trading at 70.6% on Intrade.  I suspect that will go down a few points over the next week.  Romney, after all, is due for a successful news cycle.  Or at least a non-disastrous one.

Formatting errors on this one.  It was just a complaint about people who think the shooting spree in Aurora could have been made BETTER if only the theater audience had been armed.