Settle down

By Mustang Bobby 

There's all sorts of polling out there about the presidential race and how much or how little the first debate, followed by Friday's jobs report, may have changed the outlook. Some are showing a big bounce for Mitt Romney — ooh, much rejoicing where there was doom and gloom — while some are showing not so big a bounce but still a tick up in his numbers. You can search all around until you find the poll that fits your particular narrative, too; the Republicans have their favorites, and the Democrats have theirs, too.

But if you want one source that has a track record of accuracy, check out Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. Of all the tea-leaf readers out there, he is by far the most reliable, and also the most calming. You may not like the results and you can grasp at a number of straws in his data, but overall, I'd say that on November 6, he's the one who will be on target with the actual results. (And the fact that he's a baseball fan and likes the Tigers has nothing whatsoever to do with my admiration for him and his work.)

Here's his latest outlook showing that after a busy week of debates and jobs reports, the bouncing is over for the moment and the polls are settling to where they were expected to be:

Mitt Romney remains in a considerably stronger polling position than he was before last Wednesday's debate in Denver. But the polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate's immediate aftermath.

The four national tracking polls as published on Sunday were largely unchanged from their Saturday releases. Mr. Romney maintained a 2-point lead in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, but President Obama's lead held at 2 points in an online poll published by Ipsos and at 3 points in the Gallup tracking poll. In the RAND Corporation's online tracking poll, which lists its results to the decimal place, Mr. Obama's lead declined incrementally, to 3.9 percentage points from 4.4 on Saturday.

Only the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll consists of interviews that were conducted entirely after the debate, but the share of post-debate interviews is now large enough in the other polls that we can start to come to some inferences about the overall magnitude of Mr. Romney's bounce.

[...]

If the polls settle in at showing something like a 1- or 2-point lead for Mr. Obama by this point next week, that would be reasonably well in line with where our model and others think that the election "should" be based on economic trends; it would no longer be as appropriate to think of Mr. Romney as being an underachieving candidate.

For my part, based on nothing more than just a lot of years watching elections, I've always said this would be a close race. I still think Obama will win narrowly, and I'm relieved to see the facts and the polls backing me up on it.

That said, I would still like him and the Democrats to try to win big.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)