The election is blowin' in the wind

OK, as of late Sunday night Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight blog had the numbers running like this:

1) Obama's probability of winning Electoral College: 74.6%

2) Number of Electoral votes Obama would win today: 296.6

3) Obama's probability of winning Ohio: 75%

PERSPECTIVE:

Nate's predictive model had Obama's winning probability at a pre-Denver peak of 87% and a post-Denver trough of 61.1% on October 12.  So at 74.6% Obama is halfway back up to where he was at the peak.  The persistent trend since October 12 has been an upward ziggie-zag, with two and-a-half weeks of cycles of two clicks up and one back.

However, leavening progressives’ levity is the closeness of the national popular vote, which Nate has pegged at 50.4% to 48.7% in Obama's favor. That is thin. And digging into the numbers, we see that even the Ohio projection of 75% stands on a an cross-poll average difference of 2 points.

Silver sifts these thin leads through the filter of his model, accounting for all the elements that have proven relevant over the historic span of intensely polled election campaigns. He says the stability of Obama's swing-state edges over a period of months, despite their small magnitude, undergirds their significance so as to make Obama's odds of winning at this point as strong as 3 out of 4.

Now, even one out of four is still scarily high.  The realization of that one-in-four chance would mean our turning away from the positive direction we’re headed now and turning toward a revival of "the policies that got us into this mess".  We know too well that Romney/Ryan would mean not merely a revival, their election would mean an intensification and acceleration, with consequences that would be horrific for 99% of us.

That is a point on which we do need to drill down – i.e., the concrete consequences of failing to re-elect President Obama.  That drill-down will be the focus of my next post, to come later on, as Sandy's eye passes to the south.  We're still holding our breath and hoping that losses from the storm will be on the light side.   

Speaking of which (and getting back to Nate Silver and polling), I may not need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows today in SE PA, but it was very helpful to have had one yesterday to prompt me to get off my tush and clear out my rain gutters that were overflowing with leaves and decomposed muck. (I am thankful that Ms. Sandy will have come and gone before we vote in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This will allow about a week for electricity to be restored where necessary; I hope that will be enough to avoid any disruptions in voting.)

So, pivoting back to the election, are we better off for our obsession with the polls and for having Weatherman Nate Silver there to stoke -- and satisfy -- the obsession ?  

To the extent that his sort of information has the delicately balanced dual effect of heightening both our motivation to make a personal difference and our belief in the prospect that our efforts will yield the outcome we want, then yes, Nate's numbers do serve a purpose beyond providing a twisted form of amusement for neurotic Nellies (like me).

Also, while I criticize the media pre-occupation with the horse race aspect of elections at the expense of deepening understanding of policy differences and their implications for the country's future direction, at least Silver models a more sophisticated, non-partisan framing of the horse race than the mainstream media.  The latter consider it their goal to make the race look as close and suspenseful as possible, and in lieu of objectivity they put a microphone in front of rabid partisans from each side and try not to be referees in the debate.  Even when they do "fact-checking" -- which they do in response to the public critiques of their erstwhile hands-off approach to partisan claims -- the practice still is to make sure to balance the debunking and treat each lie or exaggeration as being of equal weight and importance.

There are exceptions to the horse-race coverage, and I don't mean PBS or even NPR.  The most sophisticated discussion of policy that I've come across on television is Chris Hayes's weekend morning panel-style talk show "Up!" from 8am to 10am.  Melissa Harris Perry's show from 10am to noon is a close second.

Yes, they are liberals, but their practice is to have a person from the right on every panel. I always learn something from these shows and highly recommend them. I do love the evening MSNBC shows as well, and I do learn from them too, but in all honesty I acknowledge that Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are more intent on making points and reporting facts that resonate with the progressive perspective. Hayes and Perry (a Tulane University political science professor) conduct graduate seminars.

EIGHT DAYS TO GO.

EIGHT DAYS TO GOTV!