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Go Home Final Projection: Obama 349, Mccain 189

THE PLANK NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Final Projection: Obama 349, Mccain 189

BY NATE SILVER

It's Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Election Day in America. The last
polls have straggled in, and show little sign of mercy for John McCain.
Barack Obama appears poised for a decisive electoral victory.Our
model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in
2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada,
Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana.
These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which
looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns
North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time --
comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6
electoral votes.We
also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is
slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for
the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically
underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.This
race appears to have stabilized as of about the time of the second
debate in Nashville, Tennessee on October 8th. Since that time, Obama
has maintained a national lead of between 6 and 8 points, with little
discernible momentum for either candidate. Just as noteworthy is the
fact that the number of undecided voters is now very small,
representing not much more than 2-3 percent of the electorate.
Undecided voters who committed over the past several weeks appear to
have broken roughly equally between the two candidates.Our
model forecasts a small third-party vote of between 1 and 2 points
total; it is not likely to be a decisive factor in this election except
perhaps in Montana, where Ron Paul is on the ballot and may garner 4-5
percent of the vote.Any forecasting system is only as good as
its inputs, and so if the polls are systematically wrong, our
projection is subject to error as well. Nevertheless, even as we
account for other cycles in which the polling numbers materially missed
the national popular vote margin (such as in 1980), a McCain win
appears highly unlikely. It is also possible, of course, that the polls
are shy in Obama's direction rather than McCain's, in which case a
double-digit win is possible.Nor does McCain appear to have
much chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular
vote; in fact, our model thinks that Obama is slightly more likely to
do so. McCain diverted many of his resources to Pennsylvania, a state
where he narrowed Obama's margins somewhat, but which our model
concludes that Obama is now virtually certain to win. This may have
allowed Obama to consolidate his margins in other battleground states,
particularly Western states like Colorado and Nevada to which McCain
has devoted little recent attention.Thank you for placing your
trust in FiveThirtyEight.com and the New Republic over the course of the past several
months. I hope that you will join me on the web tonight as well as on HDNet, where I'll be providing election coverage to Dan Rather's
team.

--Nate Silver

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16 comments

VOTE!

- 3mjesus

November 4, 2008 at 1:28pm

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Thanks for all your posts, they were great, keep up the good work.

- pdx1

November 4, 2008 at 1:40pm

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No, Nate- thank you.  Really.  You've been a voice of reason.

- boneill

November 4, 2008 at 1:40pm

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Yeoman's work Nate.  Now go find a beach to crash on til pitchers and catchers report.

- adaglas

November 4, 2008 at 1:43pm

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Nate Silver is a genius and his posts here have been of tremendous value in understanding the polls.

Neil

- purcellneil

November 4, 2008 at 1:44pm

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I suspect you're right about all of those states except North Carolina, which McCain should win narrowly. We'll see soon.

- baxterjones

November 4, 2008 at 1:49pm

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Thank you. Great work. You have really been a voice of reason in this often erratic election polling cycle.

- mpintar2

November 4, 2008 at 1:55pm

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We've got a ton of blog coverage of today's goings-on thus far. Long lines, election day rituals

- Anonymous

November 4, 2008 at 1:57pm

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Well done, Nate.  Good God, I hope you're right.

- ratnerstar

November 4, 2008 at 2:01pm

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Seriously Nate. Good work and thank you.

- arsonplus

November 4, 2008 at 2:12pm

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thanks nate, your posts have been must-read for me for at least a month now.  you probably saved me an ulcer.

- thalhammer

November 4, 2008 at 2:12pm

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Thanks, Nate. Now please come up with a statistical model that allows me to fee as good about the 2009 Nats as your model says I should feel about Obama '08.

(Though I did score a media invite to Thursday's Nats new uniform unveiling, so that might be enough of a fix for me this month to allow Nate to keep focusing on politics instead of baseball.)

- rhubarbs

November 4, 2008 at 3:07pm

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Nate,

I think this is the Golden Age of political polling. And you're at the pinnacle. Thanks for the many insights.

- fougasseu

November 4, 2008 at 3:10pm

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As someone who has written polls, commissioned polls, paid for polls, and pored over the raw results to guide political campaign strategy, I want to add my congratulations to those above.  Your work here has been truly outstanding in demystifying polls and in conveying from day to day how they can and should be understood.  Without you, I think insanity would have prevailed here at TNR (as it largely did during the primary fight between Obama and Hillary).

Many thanks.

- roidubouloi

November 4, 2008 at 3:38pm

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You have been fantastic, Nate - I have quoted you and copied/pasted your blog posts to all my friends and family. I give you full credit, but it makes me look smart that I have such brilliant analysis to be able to quote. Thanks for all work this year.

I'm curious though - I would have thought Obama's popular vote percentage would be much higher and the EVs somewhat lower. I assume that states like MS will have a huge turnout that he won't win, so no EVs, but would bump up the overall popular vote tremendously....

It's gonna be a great day!

- mcgumbleton

November 4, 2008 at 3:52pm

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As of 5 PM EST November 5, Silver was wrong on just a single state: Indiana, which went to Obama. Two other states (Missouri and North Carolina) are still subject to correction and are extremely close, but as of this moment Silver has each one correct.  49 out of 50 ain't bad. Of course the margins of victory in each state are also of interest -- comparing the predicted and the actual vote received by each candidate -- and that's hopefully something Silver will report on as he does a post hoc assessment of his model.

It's also of interest that at this time Silver's prediction of a 6.1 percentage point advantage to Obama over McCain in the national popular vote is exactly correct:  NPR shows a 6.1 point difference. (This percentage may change by a tenth or two as the final corrections are made, including the West Coast states that still have significant proportions of their ballots yet to be counted.)

- Mack2

November 5, 2008 at 5:07pm

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