Friday, September 21, 2012

Don't Count Your Chickens . . .

The most recent (September 19) polling aggregation from Pollster.com shows President Obama with about a three-point lead over Governor Romney.  This, coupled with another bad couple of weeks of media coverage for the Romney campaign, has buoyed the confidence of Obama supporters and has begun to generate a sense of a hapless Romney campaign and an inevitable Obama victory.   Before Obama supporters get too carried away with their euforia, or Romney supporters with their despair, I'd like to remind them both of a guy named Al Gore, who held a fairly commanding lead over George Bush for most the better part of September in the 2000 presidential race:


Note that Gore's lead through about the third week in September was much more substantial than President Obama's current lead in the polls.  Of course, Gore went on to narrowly win the popular vote while narrowly losing the Electoral College vote.  This is not too say I expect a sudden reversal of fortunes in the next couple of weeks.  Just that the current margin really is quite narrow and conditions are still such that a reversal is a real possibility.  Both sides should be anxious; this thing is far from over.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Poll of Forecasters

Jim Campbell has assembled a list of several forecasts that will appear in the October issue of PS.

Here it is.