Electoral Math 10/6/12

Another day, another new toss-up state. Only 1 new poll was released today (Gravis Marketing) in Colorado. In it, Mitt Romney is ahead 49-46. This represents only the 2nd poll (out of 25) in this election cycle where he has held a lead here. In my projection, Obama still holds a small (0.3%) lead, but any new polling that confirms this result will likely flip the leader.
That’s not to say that it would go into the barely Romney column. It would take an extraordinary result for that to occur.
The map already looks significantly different that it did just 2 days ago. While Mitt Romney hasn’t picked up any EV in my projection just yet, Obama has lost 51EV in only 2 days and I expect that any new polls that come out in the next few days will likely swing even more states toward Romney, despite the good headline number on unemployment that came out yesterday. Wednesday night was a game changer.
As I mentioned on Thursday, state polls were going to be important, but almost just as important would be the Gallup & Rasmussen daily trackers. So far, Gallup’s tracker has moved 3 points, with only 2 of the 7 days worth of polling included in their tracker captured. Rasmussen has moved 4 points with 2 out of 3 days in their tracker poist-debate. The implication would be that the swing could be as wide as 6-10 points. It’s still a little too early to tell if this is true, but a few more days and a few more polls should prove out the hypothesis. If the swing is that wide, it would be enough to shift the election in Romney’s favor.