Obama Wins 96.3% of Time in Election Forecasts

Nate Silver has made a name for himself during this election cycle by giving dynamic polling forecasts at his site, fivethirtyeight.com. Today they released their final look at pre-election polling. What they found is very encouraging for Obama:

“Barack Obama’s position has become somewhat stronger since our update this afternoon. We now have him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier today, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively. I continue to find a hair’s worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls — even as Obama’s position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren’t.

However, Obama’s win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he’s gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).

Secondly, McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.”

Basically, this means that barring any last minute sudden change, obama will win.