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Nate Silver, the guy who has a rather remarkable record of accuracy in predicting outcomes is now saying Romney's gain in the polls following the first debate is showing signs of staying power. Good news for the Romney campaign and his supporters and reason to cause alarm in the Obama campaign and among his progressives supporters.
The New York Times - Mitt Romney continues to surge in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, and Friday may have featured his best set of polls all year.
The best way to track a change in the polls is to look for instances in which the same firm has surveyed the same state (or the national race) multiple times. The FiveThirtyEight forecast model relies on a procedure very much like this to calculate the overall trend in the race.
Fifteen polls were released on Friday that provided a comparison with another survey conducted between the Democratic convention and last week’s debate in Denver. Mr. Romney gained an average of 4.6 percentage points in these surveys.
That is actually a bit larger than we were showing earlier in the week, when the same exercise put Mr. Romney’s postdebate bounce more in the range of three or four percentage points.
It is not clear whether Mr. Romney is still gaining ground — or whether he benefited from a couple of outlying results. The median change in the polls, which will be less sensitive to potential outliers, was a three-point gain for Mr. Romney, more like earlier in the week.
But unlike earlier, Mr. Romney is now seeing some of his best results in swing state polls. Six of the seven polls published on Friday from such states had him ahead.
Thus, just as the hypothesis of a fading Romney bounce was damaged on Friday, so was the idea (which we critiqued in an earlier post) that his gains would be more modest in the swing states. {Continue Reading For More Analysis}
In his article on October 11th Nate Silver pointed out the President's "swing state firewall" is showing signs of thinning, or becoming "brittle."
At this point in time the momentum is shifting and headed in Romney's direction. It is going to be critical for Romney to repeat his successful first debate performance against the President (two more times) for him to have a shot at winning the election.
Accomplishing the task of defeating Obama in both of the remaining debates won't be easy...
Via: Memeorandum
