Thread: Electoral College Favors Obama

Latest Presidential Polls: Obama Holds insurmountable Lead in the Electoral College

Forget polls, its all about the electoral college.

LANDSLIDE!

We need to get rid the electoral college all together. In its day it served a purpose but we are quite capable of tabulating the popular vote now a days.

"273towin.com also has the latest polling for then ten swing states listed above. If the election were held today, and those polling numbers became a reality, President Obama would defeat Mitt Romney 270 to 268 in what would be the closest presidential election ever."

While I do not claim Romney will win this fact from your link is quite interesting.

It's actually 270.com

And you're right that is an interesting fact.

I also agree with DG about doing away with the electoral college. This country needs to grow up and act like a country and not 50 individual countries.

we need to get rid of deathgod.

Originally Posted by triggerhappy2005

Latest Presidential Polls: Obama Holds insurmountable Lead in the Electoral College

Forget polls, its all about the electoral college.

I dunno...

It's partly about the Electoral College, for sure. That's why campaigns are directing their resources to only a few places in the nation.

If you asked either candidate if they'd rather win the popular vote or the electoral college, what do you think their answer would be?

But it's also partly about the popular vote. Winning is important, but winning without carrying a majority of votes leaves you in a less-strong position.

There's other factors too, and those might be fun to talk about, but this is the one that matters: It's Not Over Yet.

There are weeks left in this thing. There's another debate. There is a lot of electioneering going on in the swing states which can have a significant effect on the turnout of different voter segments (which is shameful, and I wish it got more media attention). And there is plenty of time for some crazy-ass thing to happen at the last minute.

Right now, polling shows that things are looking a little better for Obama. If he can fight Romney to a draw down the home-stretch (and if the election runs smoothly), then it looks good for him. But I don't see either campaign giving up yet, and so I think it's too early to call this over.

As an aside;

In some of the other threads that mention polls I've seen comments about oversampling. Oversampling doesn't make a poll less useful. It's often designed into a survey. If you have questions about a particular segment of the population, you will over-sample that segment on purpose. When you use that poll to answer questions about the over-all population, you use weighting to correct for oversampling. Done properly, oversampling does not bias your results.

So, for example, if I'm curious about the presidential race and also about how sensitive the voters are to women's issues, I might over-sample women. I'd ask everyone who they were voting for, and also ask them if they'd change their vote if one candidate came out for a national law on paid family leave, or a program that helped fund day-care for single working mothers, or whatever.

In this case, my sample size would have to be larger - large enough so that I could get good data on who was ahead in the election, and even larger than that so I could get enough extra data points to answer some fine-grained questions about women.

Likewise, a poll that over-samples Democrats isn't trying to be biased against Republicans - it's trying to answer some sensitive questions about what Democratic voters are thinking.

Cheers,


AetheLove

At least ole peanut head Carter will be pleased to move down the worst presidents ever list.