Sunday, July 8, 2012

The real state of the Presidential election. Where is the water level?

There is so much conflicting information out there about where the Presidential election race now stands and the discussion of Red states and Purple states can get very confusing.

To help you get a sense on where the race really is, let us start by stipulating some irrefutable facts;

First, President Obama is the incumbent. Second, he has 100% name recognition. Third, most Americans rate the economy the most important issue. Fourth, the overwhelming majority Americans give Obama poor marks on the economy.

These are the facts and they are not disputed.

Now, let's look at an objective standard from the left-leaning pollingreport.com website;


An incumbent leading with less than 50% (against one challenger) is frequently in trouble; how much depends on how much less than 50%. A common pattern has been for incumbents ahead with 50% or less to end up losing. Final polls showing losing incumbents ahead are accurate. The important question is whether results are reported with an understanding of how undecideds decide.


The same website shows a historically factual breakdown of where undecided voters swing late.

So, we now have two objective standards.
  1. An incumbent under 50% is in trouble.
  2. Undecided voters break to the challenger historically at a rate of almost 7 to 1.
Let's apply those facts to the current state of today's Presidential race. First, Nationally;

Today's Real Clear Politics average (which actually inflates Obama's true strength ) shows the incumbent leading 47- 44.3. This leaves a pool of undecided voters of 8.7%. The above chart suggests that at least 82% and as many as 85% of those voters will break to Romney and 12%-15% will break for Obama. This means that Romney wins with between 51.4% to 51.7% of the vote if the election is held today. His margin of victory is no less than 3.1 points and could be as many as 3.4%. Either would be a victory larger than Bush's victory over Kerry which was 31 states and 286 Electoral votes.

Unfortunately for Obama, these numbers actually also exaggerate his strength because huge leads in deep blue states pull his average up with no electoral benefit. (California and New York alone are home to 56 million people).

To truly gauge the state of today's race, let's take the Real Clear politics average of each of the 50 states and apply both the incumbent rule and the historical pattern of how undecideds break. Here we have objective polling applied to two fundamental and objective standards.

This maps then shows, in Red, every state Obama is actually losing and, in Blue, each one he is actually winning.

The result is inescapable.

Barry is done.


Home page
DTB facebook Page
You Tube
Blog Talk Radio Show

No comments:

Post a Comment