The race is clearly tightening, according to another new national poll out today: As the candidates make their closing arguments before the election, the race has tightened with Barack Obama now leading John McCain by 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, according to a FOX News poll released Thursday. Last week Obama led […]

It seems those rumors of Obama being in trouble in PA might very well be true: Obama 47, McCain 43, Undecided 9 Dates conducted: Oct. 27-28. Error margin: 4 points. Given the margin of error this is a statistical tie.

Update: For those interested in an expert opinion on early voting and polling drop by DJ Drummond today – end update If early voting in Florida is any indication what will happen across this country come next Tuesday (and there is little reason to assume it will be some crazy outlier well outside the norm) […]

Tonight I continue my monitoring of the two families of polls being produced this year by pollsters in order to provide our readers insight into how the presidential race is playing out based on two  different assumptions on turnout models. The tracking polls in the ‘traditional’ family use historic voting trends to weight things like […]

.. about early voting trends and exit polls can be found at the NY Times Caucus Blog.

Early voting patterns are showing two things – lots of voters are coming out, and many more are ‘democrats’. Here is a list of stories that show that early voting trends are indicating record voter turnout – which cannot be solely due to Democrats in the end. But the message is clear – if you […]

If Obama loses PA he is in deep trouble. The public polls show an Obama blow out, but behind the scenes rumors persist: Tonight we spoke with a friend from Hillary Clinton’s campaign who is now working for McCain/Palin — and is specifically working with Democrats for McCain in Pennsylvania. We worked with her in […]

I know I am an unknown and anonymous blogger whose mathematical skills can easily be questioned, but it is just strange to see how slow some light bulbs are turning on in the news media. As I noted last night, the poll confusion is not confusing at all.  There are two families of polls out […]

McCain has allowed some of the campaign’s internal poll information to come out to the public – probably to give hope and energy to his base and generate some news.  I am sure both objectives will be achieved. Here are the more interesting tidbits: The campaign is functionally tied across the battleground states … with […]

When NASA or the DoD need to track a satellite we use multiple parallel models to account for gravity, solar pressure, the height and drag of the atmosphere (what little there is at orbital altitudes) and a variety of other models. We update the measurements in all these factors and run statistical models, weighting newer […]