Early Returns

It’s still early, but a few patterns seem to stand out so far.

1. Obama should be in a comfortable position for re-election. The structural forecast I’m using indicates that he’s on track to win between 52% and 53% of the national vote. There’s nothing in the state polls that strongly contradicts this right now. When combined with the current polling and run through the state-level model, this translates to a 90% chance Obama will win between 281 and 367 electoral votes. He only needs 270.

2. There are a few states where the early polling suggests a larger than expected falloff for Obama. The biggest ones are Michigan, Oregon, Wisconsin, Arizona, and… Utah. He still has a strong chance to win Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin, but the vote shares could be down by 3-6% from 2008, instead of just the 1% (on average) predicted by the structural model. (On the other hand, Obama is doing much better than expected in Massachusetts.)

3. There’s a lot of stability in the state-level opinion trends. Since most states haven’t been polled much so far, this wouldn’t be as apparent if we were only looking one state at a time. But the model is designed to pick up common trends across states. It does appear that there’s been some slight movement in Romney’s direction since May; look at Virginia, for example. This pattern is also consistent with national trends. They were just talking about this on First Read this morning.