Nate Silver of The Plank and fivethirtyeight.com has done a better job synthesizing and explaining the polls this election than any statistical analyst has done in this or any previous presidential election. He's clear, thorough and never offers even a hint of partisanship. (Obscurely enough, baseball is where he first demonstrated his stats brilliance.) Anyways, here's Silver's final take:
Final Projection: Obama 349, McCain 189
It's Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Election Day in America. The last polls have straggled in, and show little sign of mercy for John McCain. Barack Obama appears poised for a decisive electoral victory.
Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.
We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.
Read it all here...
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