Some Confusion on November 3rd

With only 24 hours to go, today's polls offer a curiously mixed picture of where the election is moving. The national tracking polls are telling us that Barack Obama is putting more distance between he and John McCain, suggesting that Obama may win going way. The state polling is telling a completely different story, a story of tightening, competitive, exciting races in Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Florida and close contests in Virginia and Colorado making for a potentially entertaining election evening tomorrow. This contrast is even more curious since these national and state polls have been done over virtually the same period, namely October 30th to November 2nd. All we can do is input the numbers and let the model crank out the results. The overall movement towards Obama has been about 0.8 percentage points:

However, because of the state level polling results, we show no movement in the Electoral College vote distribution over the past 24 hours:

There has been one change in the current national electoral map though. Virginia is once again out of the swing state club. Otherwise, there has been no change:

The swing state table shows that John McCain is hanging on by his fingernails in Florida:

My model suggests that Missouri and Ohio are reasonably comfortable for Obama:

There should be one last day of polling coming up. I am going to take these results, update the model and release my state-by-state election forecast. That should be available in time for the first polls closing at 7:00 PM Eastern time (9:00 AM Tokyo time on Wednesday for those of you following in Japan).