Obama's 2nd Term On The Rise

Today's presidential vote might be rather close in the popular vote, but the electoral college totals are (and have been) favoring the re-election of President Obama. For much of the last year or more, the strategies of Democrats and Republicans have been tightly focused on those numbers, not the popular vote - because it is the electoral college which determines winners.

Since day one of the Obama presidency, there have been very loud voices opposing him and any agenda he put forth, and those voices have truly gotten louder in the last year. But the number of those voices? They've always been a small percentage of the public.

Those pesky percentages ...

My math is usually as weak as a newborn kitten, no matter when I employ it.

The numbers-crunching of state polls, as aggregated and measured by blogger/statistician Nate Silver, has, for quite some time, claimed that Obama will be the winner:

" ... in the United States, presidential elections are won state by state, not at the national level. And with remarkable unanimity, the leading aggregators have consistently concluded that polling in the swing states -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin -- has favored Obama. And that in the vast majority of the 100,000 simulated elections Silver runs each day, the president has come out on top.

Still, each of the aggregators -- FiveThirtyEight, TPM PollTracker, HuffPost Pollster, RealClearPolitics Average, and the Princeton Election Consortium -- has its own methods, and its own results. While each of the five went into Election Day predicting a second term of the president, their numbers vary a bit."

Meanwhile, Conservative and the GOP all are claiming that polls today are all wrong in state after state, and that Romney has a secret landslide win coming. The Right Wing activist/writer Jonah Goldberg presents today the claim that statistics are utterly worthless:

"The truth is that any statistician can build a model. They do it all the time. They make assumptions about the electorate, assign weights to polls and economic indicators, etc., and then they wait for the sausage to come out. No doubt some models are better than others, and some models are simply better for a while and then regress to the mean. But ultimately, the numbers are dependent on the values you place on them. As the computer programmers like to say, garbage in, garbage out."

As I said, I haven't seen the number of voices opposing the president (or supporting Romney) grow - they have simply gotten louder. It may be a biiiiig gamble, but I think Obama wins this re-election bid. The army of Republican advisers and lobbyists say Romney has the win already in the bag.

Time will tell.