Confused About the Polls? Check Out Nate Silver

With seemingly every news agency and blog conducting its own polling for the 2012 presidential race, it’s often tough to get a true picture where the race stands:  Did Obama get a convention “bounce”?  Will it be permanent?  Who’s really ahead?

Over the past few years, I have come to rely on the New York Times‘ Nate Silver, whose diligent and informed analysis of all public polling data has become the gold standard in political prognostication.

I encourage you to check in periodically at his web site (Click here), but today’s post was so informative, I excerpt it below:

We have seen a shift toward Mr. Obama in the polls since the Democratic convention. It appears that if an election were held today, he’d win it by somewhere in the neighborhood of four or perhaps five percentage points.

If Mr. Obama is ahead by four to five points nationally, we’d certainly also expect him to post his share of leads by about that margin in swing states. Because of statistical variance and differences in methodology, some of the numbers are going to be a little bit better for him than others. But the consensus of the data ought to quite strong for him.

The Marist polls probably did meet that standard. But there were also two other polls of Ohio released on Thursday that showed Mr. Obama up only one point instead, along with a trio of Florida polls showing a tie there, on average. Those aren’t bad numbers for Mr. Obama exactly, but they aren’t great ones either — they are more like those we were seeing from the polling firms in question before the conventions.

There were also polls out on Thursday in several other swing states — in New Hampshire, Michigan and Colorado, for example. The data, taken as a whole, was pretty good for Mr. Obama, as he led in almost all of the surveys, although mostly by small margins.

But the forecast model is now judging Mr. Obama by a higher standard. Why? Because it had more or less fully priced in his convention bounce as of a few days ago. In fact, its assumption is that Mr. Obama’s polls probably slightly exaggerate his standing right now.

Click here to read the full post.