Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Predicting the Polls


As of 4:00 AM today, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight forecast projects that President Obama has a 91.6% chance of winning re-election with 315 Electoral College votes and 50.9% of the Popular Vote. What Silver also notes in his blog is that the only way Governor Romney can win the Presidency in the 2012 General Election is if the Polls are statistically biased against him. The FiveThirtyEight forecast also projects that the Democrats have a 95.3% chance of holding onto the Senate with 52 seats, meaning that President Obama and the Democrats will continue to set foreign policy for the United States after the Election (foreign policy is determined by the Senate and the President of the United States).

Oddly enough, Paul Krugman wrote a comment that may capture how voters are feeling after seeing political ads on television. Mr. Krugman's frustration is understandable, but the Nobel Laureate is mistaken if President Obama will change whether Congress will work with the White House to pass legislation in the coming year. The fact that the U.S. Congress is a bicameral establishment, that is, a Legislative body with two chambers (the House of Representatives and the Senate) complicates whether the President will sign any bill into law. Barbara Bardes in her textbook, Politics: Essentials 2011-2012, makes the point that the Framers of the Constitutions failed to anticipate the rise of Political and she might be, indeed, correct in her assessment, however, the Framers of the Constitution mention Factions in the Federalist Papers, thus, making the Bardes' statement questionable. If anything is certain its that the Constitution was designed to keep the government from passing bills too quickly.

No comments: