Nate Silver, the highly respected creator of the FiveThirtyEight elections blog at the New York Times, just increased President Obama‘s chances of winning to 79%, with a whopping 300 Electoral College votes. Recently, Obama’s lowest chance of winning was put at 61.1% on October 12, and it’s been climbing steadily ever since. Silver today points to Obama’s battleground states “firewall” as holding — good news for the President’s hopes of winning the electoral college vote, the one that truly matters, although he still projects Obama winning the popular vote as well, by a very slim 50.5%
Mr. Obama had one more terrible day in the polls, on Friday, Oct. 12, when Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College rose to almost 40 percent in the forecast. But that was when Mr. Romney’s momentum stopped. Since then, Mr. Obama’s standing has rebounded slightly. His position in the national polls has stabilized; although the national polls continue to tell a different story about the race than the state polls do; it can no longer be said that they have Mr. Obama behind. (More about that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.
Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, Silver has been getting a walloping by right wing radicals. The Atlantic Wire had perhaps the best take on this a few days ago: “People Who Can’t Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver.” And, of course, there were the predictable attacks on Silver from those who really hate him, like the so-called “Unskewed polls” guy: he’s gay. Silver responded:
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