Presidential Race Polling Very Close

With the election looming just two weeks away, and the final debate between President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney in the books, the focus turns to polls.  The race has tightened in recent weeks, especially in the key battleground states of Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. The President carried all these states in his win over Senator John McCain in the 2008 election, though polls indicate the 2012 election will be much closer, particularly in the previously mentioned battleground states.  While the President maintained an early advantage in Ohio, Iowa, and Colorado, recent polls in these states place the two candidates in a near deadlocked battle.  Mitt Romney has retained a slight lead in Florida, arguably the most important battleground state, over the past month.

The Economist has compiled an election season map, with polling details for each state.  Based on the most recent polling results President Obama possesses 253 likely Electoral College votes (17 shy of the 270 necessary for victory) to Mitt Romney's 191. However, there are still 94 votes from battleground states that are up in the air.  Should Mitt Romney hold onto his lead in Florida, he would receive 29 votes - the third most for any state.  This would leave him 50 votes shy of victory with 65 votes still on the table.  While Florida represents the most votes for any battleground state, Ohio may yet be the most important.  If the President takes Ohio along with the other 253 likely Obama votes, he surpasses the 270 vote mark with a single vote to spare.  A recent Quinnipiac Poll gives the President a five-point lead in Ohio, and he's led the state in most polls throughout the past two months.  

FiveThirtyEight: Gingrich Leads Five Plausible GOP Candidates in Iowa

In a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post, Nate Silver shared a preview of his polling-based forecasts for the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, the official versions of which he plans to release in a few days. The statistical analysis is based on state-by-state polling; Silver writes that although more objective and subjective factors could be taken into account, "building a well-calibrated forecast from the polls is challenging enough given the uncertainties inherent in primary polling, and so that’s what we’ve decided to focus on rather than anything fancier."

The polling-based analysis for Iowa has Newt Gingrich projected to win 25.1% of the vote, followed by Ron Paul, with 20.7%; Mitt Romney (15.6%); Rick Perry (12.3%); and Michele Bachmann (11.4%); and both Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman Jr., who are projected to garner under 10 percent of the vote. In his blog post, Silver explains the three factors used to calculate the projections: a weighted polling average, which emphasizes more recent polling as being a better predictor of probable primary results; the reallocated average, "which takes undecided voters and allocates them among the viable candidates;" and a process Silver calls momentum, which "looks at the near-term trend in a candidate’s polling and assigns a small bonus or penalty based upon it."

Silver warns, however, that these projections "are not very precise, because primary polling is not very precise." He tries to quantify this uncertainty, providing both confidence intervals for each candidate's projections and their win probability, "which combines the vote projections and the uncertainty together to estimate how likely each candidate is to win the caucuses." Gingrich leads with an estimated 49.6% probability, followed by Paul, with 28.2%; Romney (10.6%); Perry (5.2%); and Bachmann (4.1%).

According to Silver's analysis, "Although Mr. Gingrich still has the lead, Iowa looks to be fairly wide open with as many as five plausible winners.

Elections and Rural Bias

Every four years, America's chief politicians make a pilgrimage to Iowa and New Hampshire, two states that in to a large extent influence who will be America's two presidential nominees. Iowa and New Hampshire, of course, don't have the most delegates of any state, but the media coverage, money and momentum that candidates receive from high finishes in these first two states often makes them unbeatable (the 2008 election was unique in this regard, with both primaries competitive well past Super Tuesday). In 2007, Brown economists Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff set out to quantify exactly how much more influence voters in Iowa and New Hampshire had in the 2004 Democratic primary than voters in other states. Knight and Schiff noted that anecdotal correlations between candidates who win Iowa or New Hampshire and those who win the nomination are too simplistic because those correlations could reflect underlying candidate strength and examined changes in polling data in late states as a response to the outcomes of primaries in early states. In short, they found primary voters and caucus goers in the earliest states had eight times the influence of those in the latest states.

It's not just the nomination system that biases American policy toward rural areas. States with small populations (which tend, of course, to be rural) are overrepresented in the Senate and Electoral College. To take the most extreme case, a citizen of Wyoming has 69 times the influence in the United States Senate as a citizen of California (that is to say, Wyoming's 544000 residents have the same representation as California's 37 million) and 3.7 times the influence in the Presidential election (three electoral votes per 544000 residents versus 55 per 37 million residents).

David Leonhardt in the New York Times argues that these systems of unequal representation have profound policy consequences. He notes that early-voting states are more likely to receive pork than late-voting ones if they supported the winning candidate, and that the Iowa caucuses have turned ethanol subsidies into an untouchable third rail despite little evidence they contribute much to solving the climate crisis. Most of all, he argues that America has an "anti-urban policy bias," focusing on the issues important to rural and small-town voters even though he believes that "national prosperity depends on urban prosperity."

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