Obama’s Lead Is Starting to Look Insurmountable

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Nate Silver has an epic post today about late September polls from past years and how well they predict the eventual winner of a presidential race. Here are the highlights:

  • Obama is currently up by 3.7 percent. No candidate in the past 50 years has lost a lead that big.
  • No candidate with more than 47 percent of the vote in late September has ever lost. Obama is currently at 48.3 percent.
  • Big changes in the final month aren’t impossible, but they’ve gotten rarer in the past 20 years.
  • It’s not true that undecided voters tend to break for the challenger in the last few weeks of a race.

Read the whole thing for more. At the moment, though, the race is pretty clearly Obama’s to lose. And Sam Wang agrees: his latest electoral vote forecast has Obama winning 347-191. Given all this, I’ll make two predictions of my own:

  • The mudslinging from the Romney campaign is going to get really, really nasty and desperate over the next few weeks.
  • The smart money is shortly going to start deserting Romney and focusing downballot instead. The conservative base never liked Romney all that much to begin with, and I don’t think it will take much for them to abandon him.

Make your own predictions in comments!

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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