Romney given only 8% chance of winning

New analysis by a respected political scientist indicates that there is a 92% probability that Obama will maintain his lead in the polls and win the election.  Small wonder Republicans are worried.

Drew Linzer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University.  He has a blog VOTAMATIC that provides forecasts and polling analysis for the 2012 presidential election.  Linzer tracks the most recent state polls and then uses a statistical model to project the likely outcome of the election under different scenarios of how the poll results might change.

 

In a post today, Linzer provides some analysis of what his model suggests is likely to happen between now and Election Day.  Specifically, Linzer looks at the probability that Obama can maintain his lead in the polls in key battleground states and win the election.  Linzer ran 10,000 plausible “states of the race” scenarios in all 50 states.

Linzer has some very bad news for Romney.  Linzer’s statistical forecasts of the most probable outcome gives Obama has a 92% chance of winning the election with a median of 347 electoral votes.  

Even when Linzer plugs in some very favorable assumptions for Romney, the outcome doesn’t change that much.  Obama still has a 62% chance of winning.

Of course, the Republicans will argue that Linzer’s analysis is based upon state polling and that the state polls this year are flawed.  Linzer took a look at that.  He finds that the polls this year and behaving about as expected given their sample size.  In fact, Linzer says: “What is actually astounding about the polls this year is how well they are behaving, compared to theoretical expectations….It turns out that most polls have been exactly where they should be – within two or three points of the model estimates. And that’s without any correction in my model for “house effects,” or systematic biases in the results of particular polling organizations.”

As I said, that’s all bad news for Romney and the Republicans.  We can only hope that Linzer is right.  

Read Linzer’s post here:  http://votamatic.org/