state of the race

As far as I can tell, it's eerily static. Although John McCain's camp is claiming to detect a tightening, the evidence for it is slight.

Meanwhile, it may be that the polls are actually underestimating Obama's strength. The evidence for this is the extraordinarily high turnout in early voting in states with high African-American populations. Pollsters base their estimates of turnout on previous elections - what else do they have to go on?  But if these early figures are anything to go by the turnout amongst blacks for Obama will be much higher than ever seen before. Which kind of makes sense.

Also, the latest Pew poll (an authoritative source) gives Obama a whacking lead. This has been written off by the McCain camp, quite reasonably, as an outlier. But Pew does something most pollsters don't do. It talks to voters who don't have land lines, only cellphones, who tend to be young voters. If that's giving them a more realistic sample, then it may be that they're just more right than most of the other pollsters. A reality-based outlier. The big unknown there, though, is whether young people will actually get out and vote in big numbers, the scamps.

Finally as Nate Silver points out in the post linked to above, the news at battleground level is even worse for McCain. He's making a little progress in Pennsylvania, but he's moving backwards in Nevada, and Obama still has significant leads in Ohio and Florida (if Obama ends up winning Florida, by the way, it's game over).

I'd actually welcome better news for McCain at the moment. It would make for more excitement. And perhaps an even higher turnout. But it's really hard to find any.

Comments

[peter]

The decision by the Republican Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, to extend the opening hours at early-voting booths leads me to think that Gov. Crist personally anticipates an Obama victory, and wants to be remembered as having played his part in it.