US presidential election predictions - no contest
Posted by: Jan-Erik Nordoen on 05 November 2012
The extract below is from the New Scientist article "The US presidential election is no contest". The PredictWise site puts Obama's likelihood of victory at 71.8 % and Romney's at 28 %, while over at FiveThirtyEight, it's even more in Obama's favour : 86.3 to 13.7 %.
FROM tabloids and broadsheets to left-leaning blogs and conservative talk shows, the US media has been united on one point in recent months: the presidential election is too tight to call. The difference between the candidates is "razor thin", The New York Post said recently. The "race remains close", agreed The Washington Post. According to The New York Times it is "widely expected to rest on a final blitz of advertising and furious campaigning".
But it takes just a few clicks to go from that last article to one that tells a very different story - one much more in keeping with what science tells us about the election. The New York Times hosts FiveThirtyEight, a blog by statistician Nate Silver dedicated to crunching electoral numbers. It gives the Republican challenger Mitt Romney a 1-in-4 chance of victory. Over at PredictWise, another source of political forecasts, Romney's odds are only a shade better. The race isn't close or razor-thin or dependent on advertising. It is President Obama's to lose - something that readers are rarely told.
Why the discrepancy? To answer that question, think about what polls actually are. They are often taken as an indication of who will win the election. But polls only provide a snapshot, often with a large margin of error, of who would win if the election took place today. That's very different from what we really care about, which is the candidate most likely to win the real thing in November. That's a forecast. It's what FiveThirtyEight and PredictWise provide, and it's a more complex beast than a poll.
Full article here :
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...n-is-no-contest.html
So one of these guys will get to fix the economy...
after Six Billion dollars gets spent on electioneering...
yeah okay 
I have no doubt the view from here in the UK is not entirely neutral but don't the serious American commentators not have something to say about the state of democracy in the USA? From Primaries onwards the whole system looks to be a total mess.
The vast sums of money spent, the role of religion, the issue of voter registration, the pervasive negative (and downright dishonest) campaigning.
I am not siding with any particular party here, just making a general comment, and one I suspect applies to congess/senate systems too.
It used to be that if a fact checking news reporter caught a candidate in a lie, it was a big deal, and their reputation suffered from being exposed.
But with the death of the daily newspapers, this type of information is no longer being pushed to people's doorsteps every morning. If you want to be informed, you have to work at it -- you have to find your own reliable sources and pull the information from them. Most don't do that. They come home after a long day of hard work, and plop themselves in front of the tube...
So what happened in Ohio when fact checkers pointed out that Romney's ads about Obama working with "the Italians" to outsource American automotive jobs to China was an outright lie? The Romney campaign doubled the amount of airtime for the ads, and called the fact checkers liers. If you are tired, overworked and underpaid, it is only natural to want to blame someone for your situation. Ads like this -- no matter how ludicrous -- play well to people's frustrations. And again, there's no morning newspaper warning them that they are being told a lie...
Yeah, it is all pretty f'ed up.
Hook
PS - Even the republican CEO of Chysler has called the ad a lie. Doesn't matter, as the truth is being crushed under a tidal wave of campaign spending. And oh yeah, those evil Italians being mentioned are Fiat, the owners of Chrysler. But my friend in southern Ohio said the ad made it sound like the Mafia!
PPS - For the last 20 years, conservative PACs have spent millions on characterizing US media outlets as being controlled by liberals, making it very easy for them to dismiss facts as fiction....even when the source is a conservative publication (e.g., the Wall Street Journal). As a result, climate change is nothing more than a left-wing plot, and the horrible memories of oil gushing uncontrollably, week after week, into the Gulf of Mexico have been erased by new choruses of "drill baby drill"! 
... and if he doesn't we'll gladly trade him for our Canadian Prime Minister. Shame we can't do that, like with hockey players 
Oh, the tension is killing me, I can't wait to find out if it will be a left-wing socialist authoritarian corporatist warmonger who sh*ts all over the Constitution – or a right-wing fascist-minded authoritarian corporatist warmonger who sh*ts all over the Constitution...what a game changer.
Damn. And I thought I was cynical. I understand though.
Oh, the tension is killing me, I can't wait to find out if it will be a left-wing socialist authoritarian corporatist warmonger who sh*ts all over the Constitution – or a right-wing fascist-minded authoritarian corporatist warmonger who sh*ts all over the Constitution...what a game changer.
Only in America could Obama be regarded as a socialist... much of the US has moved so far to the right that Regan probably wouldn't get a look in in today's Republican Party
The question is if the US is so bad, much of the US is so right wing then why would everyone is so interested in it?
Daft question.
Everyone's interested in the US because it's the most powerful nation on Earth. What happens there generally affects us all. 