Could Romney Still Win?

On Sunday, as a blizzard of new polls confirmed the lack of a last-minute bounce for the Mittster, I tweeted out: “Apart from George Will, does anyone still think Romney will win the electoral college?” Apparently, they do. Here are the names of the Romney optimists: Karl Rove and Dick Morris, who need no introduction; Michael Barone, the veteran political analyst; John Ellis, a media pundit who used to be a senior executive at Fox News; Jennifer Rubin, neoconservative columnist at the Washington Post; and Donald Trump.

[#image: /photos/5909543d6552fa0be682ca2a]

Two days on, with Election Day upon us, not much has changed. The vast majority of pundits, academics, and forecasters agree that Obama will win. Indeed, there is a broad consensus about his likely margin of victory in the electoral college: 303 to 235. In addition to myself, a number of prognosticators have settled on these figures. They include the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi; the Slate blogger Matt Yglesias; the Huffpo’s Pollster tracking model; the Web site PredictWise, the consulting firm CabPolitical. Most other forecasts are grouped around the 303-235 projection. Early Tuesday morning, Nate Silver’s 538 model was predicting Obama 315, Romney 223; Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium had it at Obama 309, Romney 229. Larry Sabato and his colleagues at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics were predicting that Obama would do slightly less well but still win. Their figures for the electoral college: Obama 290, Romney 248.

There is no mystery about this clustering. Everybody was looking at the same state polls, which, on average, showed Obama leading in all the battleground states except Florida. This is true of the poll of polls calculated by Real Clear Politics, TPM, and the Huffington Post. The 303-235 projection assumes that the Romney will win Florida but lose in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Sabato is predicting that Romney will also win Virginia, which has thirteen electoral votes. That explains why he has the G.O.P. candidate at 248 rather than 235. The more upbeat mathematical forecasts from Silver and Wang reflect the state polls plus the recent uptick in Obama’s national standing.

I make no particular claim for my methodology, which is based on a regular monitoring of the poll-of-polls, together with a respect for demographics, and a reading of as many individual poll internals as I can stomach. Unless there is a compelling reason to go against the poll-of-polls, I go with them. Others use gut instincts, more elaborate poll filtering, and Monte Carlo simulations. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. But whatever one is used, we are all cooking roughly the same figures. If you think Romney is going to win, you have to explain why the polls are horribly wrong. What explanation could there be for such an eventuality?

1. A last minute swing to Romney: Polls are snapshots. If something happens after they are taken, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong; just out of date. The problem with this theory is that there was virtually no evidence of a late swing towards the G.O.P. To the contrary, any movement there was appears to have been in Obama’s direction. Take the Gallup tracking poll of likely voters, which for much of October had Romney well ahead. After Hurricane Sandy struck, the poll was suspended with Romney up 51-46. On Monday, Gallup released a new poll based on survey work done between Thursday and Sunday. It showed Romney’s lead cut to one point.

2. Systematic sampling error: Speaking to Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Sunday, Dick Morris claimed that most of the polls, particularly the state polls, have been oversampling Democrats all along, and that Romney would still win big. “It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history,” Morris said. Morris is far from the only one taking this line: it is a virtual article of faith among analysts sympathetic to the Republicans that the pollsters are weighting their raw findings to reflect an unrealistic Democratic turnout based on what happened in 2008. For example, the blogger NumbersMuncher argues that the problem is particularly acute in Ohio.

This is a complicated issue, which has sparked much discussion. (A few days ago, at Huffpo, Nick Gourevitch, the director of research at the Global Strategy Group, had a detailed discussion of some of the nuances.) My reading is that it could be a significant issue in some states, but it’s unlikely to be decisive. In releasing the results of its most recent poll of Ohio, for example, NBC News (together with the Wall Street Journal and Marist College) estimated what would have happened if it had cut in half the Democrats’ advantage in identified voters. The result: Obama’s lead would have been cut from six points to three points—i.e. he would still have been markedly ahead.

3. Independents breaking to Romney: This is certainly happening in some places, but not in others. While the G.O.P. candidate appears to be running ahead among independents in Ohio, for example, he seems to be lagging among independents in Colorado. Moreover, there is always the tricky issue of how to identify independents. When pushed, many of them turn out to vote consistently for one party or the other; they just don’t like to have a party label attached to them. But the biggest problem with this theory is that it is really a version of the first theory. If independents were breaking to Romney in large numbers across the country, the national polls should be picking it up, and they aren’t.

4. Early voters go for Romney: Most of the polls suggest that Obama holds a considerable advantage among the thirty million or so Americans who have already voted. Early voters certainly facilitated Obama’s route to victory in 2008, when his campaign’s elaborate get-out-the-vote operation in swing states left the Republicans flat-footed. Just conceivably, this time will be different. In an article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove claimed that in Ohio the gap between the number of Democrats and Republicans who have voted early or requested an absentee ballot is about 257,000 less this year than it was in 2008, and he claimed these figures “point toward a Romney victory.”

We shall see. All we know for sure, courtesy of the Ohio electoral authorities, is that by the end of last week about 1.6 million Ohioans had already voted: twenty-nine per cent of them were Democrats, twenty-three per cent were Republicans. (The rest weren’t affiliated with either party.) Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida are other places where the authorities have confirmed that more Democrats than Republicans have voted early. In Colorado, the converse appears to be true: according to an AP tally published on Monday, the G.O.P. has the lead.

Quite possibly, early voting has become so popular that it doesn’t give a big edge to either party. In some state, such as Iowa and Nevada, by the time the polls opened a majority of voters had already have filled out their ballots. Had there been no early voting, the vast majority of these people would have voted today. But what edge there is goes to Obama. For example, given his lead among early voters in Ohio (and despite Rove’s numbers), his campaign officials claim that Romney, in order to carry the state, would have to come out ahead in today’s voting by ten points, which is asking a great deal.

5. Many people lied to the pollsters: I haven’t seen this possibility discussed much, but it was a popular explanation for a polling debacle I mentioned in my earlier post: the 1992 British general election, in which John Major and the Conservatives handily defeated Neil Kinnock and Labour despite being well behind in the polls. The theory was that after thirteen years of Tory rule, many Britons told the pollsters they were ready to vote for the Labour Party and Kinnock, a former left-winger who had moved to the center, when in reality they weren’t. In the context of 2012, a somewhat similar argument would be that many Americans are secretly planning to vote against Obama, but they didn’t want to tell the pollsters for fear of sounding like a racist.

By its nature, a phenomenon of this sort wouldn’t have been detectable in the polls. Still, I don’t think it happened. One of the most striking things about this election is how many white voters were willing to tell the pollsters that they were voting against Obama. According to an election-eve poll from CNN/ORC International, Romney had a seventeen point lead among white voters: 57 to 40. Perhaps some minority voters were secretly planning to vote against Obama and told the pollsters otherwise, but I doubt there are very many of them—certainly not enough to swing the election.

In short, I don’t find convincing any of the possible explanations for how Romney could defy the polls and clamber his way to an upset victory. I think he will lose. But now it’s up to the voters. Let’s see what they decide.

See our full coverage of Election Day at The Political Scene.

Photograph by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty. Illustration by Maximilian Bode.