three years

three years.  139 profile views.  it's been awhile.

where to start, where to start.

hmm, how about the presidential election?  Romney, I read over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, is still the favorite.

No he's not. He has clearly and consistently trailed Obama in the projections for the electoral college, projections based straightforwardly on real data about voter preferences and not theoretical projections based on economic data.

This race will almost certainly be closer than 2008;  Obama seems likely to lose IN and the NE 2nd Congressional district, though the loss in Nebraska is as more due to changes in the district (more Republican Omaha suburbs, fewer Democrats and minority voters.)  If the election were today, he probably loses NC in a close race, but Obama still wins after losing FL, VA & OH - and Obama is slightly ahead or very close in all those states.

Since 1992, over the last five elections, every Democrat has won has won 18 states (CA, CT, DE, HI, IL,  MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NJ, NY, OR, RI, PA, VT, WA, WI) and DC, currently worth 242 electoral votes.  Obama won all of those states by more than 10 points.  Put those states in the bag for a moment:  Obama thus needs to find 28 more electoral votes.  NM (5 votes, 3 out of 5) is trending away from Republicans due to Hispanic voters; Obama won by more than 15%.  CO (9 votes, 2 out of 5) and NV (6 votes, 3 our of 5) are also moving away, due both to Hispanic populations and population shifts from other states.  Mitt isn't likely to find enough LDS voters to overcome the Hispanic advantage - the reason that we have Senator Harry Reid and Senator Mike Bennett.  NV was plus 11%; CO was close to 9%.   Romney has never been popular in Iowa.  Christian conservatives might vote for him, but it's like the Man's Prayer that ends  The Red Greeen Show that Iowans love so much (the Iowa paraphrase:  "I'm a Republican, but I can nominate Mitt Romney, if I have to, I guess").  Iowa (4 out of 5) was plus 9%:  add those 6 electoral votes in.  NH (4 out of 5) was almost 9% as well, and with those 4 electoral votes, Barack Obama is at 272. 

He may be the second incumbent to be re-elected to a second term while doing worse in the electoral college.  Wilson is the other, and of course benefited from TR running as a third-party candidate in 1912, Wilson's first win.  I'm not counting FDR, who slumped a little in his third and fourth term from his second term, or Harry Truman, who was on the 1944 ticket as the VP but dropped off in electoral votes when he headed the ticket.  It would be wrong though to predict that Obama will lose if he loses IN and NC.  If nothing else, the population of events in this metric is too small for us to have a lot of confidence in the reliability of its predictive power. In that same way, the economic forecasting models used to predict a Romney victory rely on even fewer events to  regarded as reliable predictors. If you follow the various sites that predict the presidential election (538, the poll-averaging sites, the market-based sites), you'll see a general consensus of an Obama victory for most of this year.  Theories are fine, but to the extent we have real data, the data makes different predictions than the theories. Einstein famously said that he would have felt sorry for the Lord had physical evidence contradicted his theory because his theory was correct. Most of us aren't Einstein though, and its best to follow the data and not the theory when the two diverge.

Obama is ahead. Has been for months. He could still lose, but a victory isn't going to be a "come from behind" victory.