Nate Silver forecasts President Obama will win reelection despite Romney's strong advances, and in some cases leads in some national poll averages. Oct 10: Is Romney Leading Now, Silver's forecast gives our President a 66.1% to 33.9% "probability," of winning with an expected electoral vote total of 289.9 to 248, but moves both Florida and Colorado into Romney's column.
Silver's popular vote share forecast of Obama 50% to Romney 48.9%.
On the down side Nate Silver thinks Romney may have received the largest post-debate "bounce-or swing" on record.
There is some spotty evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce may have been as large as five or six points in polls conducted in the 48 hours after the debate, so perhaps the most recent data does reflect something of a comedown for him. But if his bounce started out at five or six points and has now settled in at three or four, that would still reflect an extremely profound swing in the race — consistent with the largest shifts produced by past presidential debates. We’ll see what happens once the news cycle turns over, such as after Thursday’s vice-presidential debate.
For the time being, however, Mr. Romney continues to rocket forward in our projections. The forecast model now gives him about a one-in-three chance of winning the Electoral College (more specifically, a 32.1 percent chance), his highest figure since Aug. 22 and more than double his chances from before the debate. Mr. Romney may have increased his chances of becoming president by 15 or 20 percent based on one night in Denver.
But, the good news for us is that Obama seems to have an advantage in the structure of the electoral college, which Silver explores in great detail, which I recommend but will not try to summarize in the short amount of time before the debate.
On average among the 11 battleground states, we show Mr. Obama with a 2.3 percentage point lead, or 1.9 percentage points as weighted by each state’s turnout in 2008. ...
All of this is a very long-winded way of answering the question in the headline: is Mr. Romney ahead right now? None of the systems that rely on state-level polling say that he’s ahead in the Electoral College right now, although the FiveThirtyEight models perceive a slightly smaller Electoral College gap between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama than some of the other systems.
So, this is a bit of upbeat news about our continued hold on the electoral college lead as we go into the Vice Presidential debate which should be starting any minute now.