Stochastic Democracy compiles all available 2012 matchup polls and uses them to forecast electoral breakdowns for Obama vs Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee, and Romney.
Even though the election is more then a year and a half away, we already have 123 presidential polling match-ups in 27 states. Almost all of them are from Public Policy Polling - a well respected North Carolina polling firm that did very well in 2010. This is easily an order of magnitude more polls than we had at this point in the last election. The problem is that all of these polls are done on a sample of registered voters instead of likely voters due to the inability to forecast who is going to turn out to vote next November.
Discrepency between Likely and Registered polls in the last four national elections, estimated using Stochastic Democracy's Bayesian DLM model with House-Effects.
This can be a big problem. Because Republican support is concentrated amongst richer high-turnout groups, Republicans almost always do better among Likely voters than Registered Voters. This gap varies from election to election, almost disappearing at at half a point in 2008, but increasing five-fold to 2.6% in 2010. Because of this, it can be helpful breaking down results into different turnout scenarios in order interpret current Registered Voter polls.
Presidential vote estimates by candidate, Turnout, and state. Color scale runs from red to white to blue. Click here for larger version.
This is a big map to digest. We've compiled all available state-by-state presidential maps and aggregated them by state, using Obama Approval and demographic information to fill in data for the states without polls via a 3 variable linear regression model (R^2~.96).
Obama needs 270 electoral votes to win the election
The take-away from this is that if the election was today, Obama would win under most turnout candidate combinations. Even under the most favorable Republican electorate in recent history, Obama would still defeat Gingrich and Palin in a land-slide. Romney and Huckabee can win, but only if they can keep the Enthusiasm gap near 2010 levels.
But this is only if the election was today. If the economy heads south due to an oil shock or a government shutdown, then Obama's baseline approval could decrease. I'd also expect a lot of Republicans who don't want to commit to Palin and Gingrich to come home. But as of now, Obama looks to be a favorite heading into the electoral cycle.